The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley, by T. H. Huxley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Author: T. H. Huxley Release Date: November 22, 2011 [EBook #38097] Last Updated: January 22, 2013 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS *** Produced by David Widger
* This alludes to a foregoing enumeration of the seven
families of Primates headed by the Anthropini containing man
alone.
CLXXVII
The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing
an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary
causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in
view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living
world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces,
I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of
Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed—from tne
inorganic to the organic—from blind force to conscious intellect and
will.
CLXXVIII
Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated
truth.
CLXXIX
Thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional
prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung the best
evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his long
progress through the Past a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment
of a nobler Future...
And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will
attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and
Andes of the living world—Man. Our reverence for the nobility of
manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance
and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the
marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the
secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organised
the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every
individual life in other animals; so that, now, he stands raised upon it
as on a mountain top, far above the level of nis humble fellows, and
transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray
from the infinite source of truth.
CLXXX
Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of Anthropology, the great science
which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the
relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in
the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and searches
after the conditions whicn have determined his presence IN the world. And
Anthropology is a section of Zoology, which again is the animal half of
Biology—the science of life and living things.
Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the
ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach
his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the
pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological
peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would
inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,—"persistent
modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid
from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity-Language;
and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker—a
hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life—he
may apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a searching
analysis of their words and grammatical forms.
Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the practical life of men;
and relying upon the inherent conservatism and small inventiveness of
untutored mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, or in
weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clue to the origin of the
resemblances and differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that kind of
evidence which is yielded by History proper, and consists of the beliefs
of men concerning past events, embodied in traditional, or in written,
testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, Archaeology, which is the
interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the
epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide
him. And, when even the dim light of archaeology fades, there yet remains
Palaeontology which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once
more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who
have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of
waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition.
CLXXXI
The rapid increase of natural knowledge, which is the chief characteristic
of our age, is effected in various ways. The main army of science moves to
the conquest of new worlds slowly and surely, nor ever cedes an inch of
the territory gained. But the advance is covered and facilitated by the
ceaseless activity of clouds of light troops provided with a weapon—always
efficient, if not always an arm of precision—the scientific
imagination. It is the business of these enfants perdus of science
to make raids into the realm of ignorance wherever they see, or think they
see, a chance; and cheerfully to accept defeat, or it may be annihilation,
as the reward of error. Unfortunately the public, which watches the
progress of the campaign, too often mistakes a dashing incursion of the
Uhlans for a forward movement of the main body; fondly imagining that the
strategic movement to the rear, which occasionally follows, indicates a
battle lost by science. And it must be confessed that the error is too
often justified by the effects of the irrepressible tendency which men of
science share with all other sorts of men known to me, to be impatient of
that most wholesome state of mind—suspended judgment; to assume the
objective truth of speculations which, from the nature of the evidence in
their favour, can have no claim to be more than working hypotheses.
The history of the "Aryan question" affords a striking illustration of
these general remarks.
CLXXXII
Language is rooted half in the bodily and half in the mental nature of
man. The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of language could not
be produced without a peculiar conformation of the organs of speech; the
enunciation of duly accented syllables would be impossible without the
nicest coordination of the action of the muscles which move these organs;
and such co-ordination depends on the mechanism of certain portions of the
nervous system. It is therefore conceivable that the structure of this
highly complex speaking apparatus should determine a man's linguistic
potentiality; that is to say, should enable him to use a language of one
class and not of another. It is further conceivable that a particular
linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become as good a race mark
as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proven that the linguistic
potentialities of all men are the same.
CLXXXIII
Community of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even
presumptive evidence of racial identity. All that it does prove is that,
at some time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken place
between the speakers of the same language.
CLXXXIV
The capacity of the population of Europe for independent progress while in
the copper and early bronze stage—the "palaeo-metallic" stage, as it
might be called—appears to me to be demonstrated in a remarkable
manner by the remains of their architecture. From the crannog to the
elaborate pile-dwelling, and from the rudest enclosure to the complex
fortification of the terramare, there is an advance which is obviously a
native product. So with the sepulchral constructions; the stone cist, with
or without a preservative or memorial cairn, grows into the chambered
graves lodged in tumuli; into such megalithic edifices as the dromic
vaults of Maes How and New Grange; to culminate in the finished masonry of
the tombs of Mycenae, constructed on exactly the same plan. Can anyone
look at the varied series of forms which lie between the primitive five or
six flat stones fitted together into a mere box, and such a building as
Maes How, and yet imagine that the latter is the result of foreign
tuition? But the men who built Maes How, without metal tools, could
certainly have built the so-called "treasure-house" of Mycenae, with them.
CLXXXV
Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the quaternary, or pleistocene,
age from our own is immense, and it is difficult to form an adequate
notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is an abysmal difference between
the Neanderthaloid race and the comely living specimens of the blond
long-heads with whom we are familiar. But the abyss of time between the
period at which North Europe was first covered with ice, when savages
pursued mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp stones in
central France, and the present day, ever widens as we learn more about
the events which bridge it. And, if the differences between the
Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided into as many parts as
that time contains centuries, the progress from part to part would
probably be almost imperceptible.
CLXXXVI
I have not been one of those fortunate persons who are able to regard a
popular lecture as a mere hors d'oeuvre, unworthy of being ranked
among the serious efforts of a philosopher; and who keep their fame as
scientific hierophants unsullied by attempts—at least of the
successful sort—to be understanded of the people.
On the contrary, I found that the task of putting the truths learned in
the field, the laboratory and the museum, into language which, without
bating a jot of scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible, taxed
such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to the uttermost;
indeed my experience has furnished me with no better corrective of the
tendency to scholastic pedantry which besets all those who are absorbed in
pursuits remote from the common ways of men, and become habituated to
think and speak in the technical dialect of their own little world, as if
there were no other.
If the popular lecture thus, as I believe, finds one moiety of its
justification in the self-discipline of the lecturer, it surely finds the
other half in its effect on the auditory. For though various sadly comical
experiences of the results of my own efforts have led me to entertain a
very moderate estimate of the purely intellectual value of lectures;
though I venture to doubt if more than one in ten of an average audience
carries away an accurate notion of what the speaker has been driving at;
yet is that not equally true of the oratory of the hustings, of the House
of Commons, and even of the pulpit?
Yet the children of this world are wise in their generation; and both the
politician and the priest are justified by results. The living voice has
an influence over human action altogether independent of the intellectual
worth of that which it utters. Many years ago, I was a guest at a great
City dinner. A famous orator, endowed with a voice of rare flexibility and
power; a born actor, ranging with ease through every part, from refined
comedy to tragic unction, was called upon to reply to a toast. The orator
was a very busy man, a charming conversationalist and by no means despised
a good dinner; and, I imagine, rose without having given a thought to what
he was going to say. The rhythmic roll of sound was admirable, the
gestures perfect, the earnestness impressive; nothing was lacking save
sense and, occasionally, grammar. When the speaker sat down the applause
was terrific and one of my neighbours was especially enthusiastic. So when
he had quieted down, I asked him what the orator had said. And he could
not tell me.
That sagacious person John Wesley is reported to have replied to some one
who questioned the propriety of his adaptation of sacred words to
extremely secular airs, that he did not see why the Devil should be left
in possession of all the best tunes. And I do not see why science should
not turn to account the peculiarities of human nature thus exploited by
other agencies: all the more because science, by the nature of its being,
cannot desire to stir the passions, or profit by the weaknesses, of human
nature. The most zealous of popular lecturers can aim at nothing more than
the awakening of a sympathy for abstract truth, in those who do not really
follow his arguments; and of a desire to know more and better in the few
who do.
At the same time it must be admitted that the popularisation of science,
whether by lecture or essay, has its drawbacks. Success in this department
has its perils for those who succeed. The "people who fail" take their
revenge, as we have recently had occasion to observe, by ignoring all the
rest of a man's work and glibly labelling him a mere populariser. If the
falsehood were not too glaring, they would say the same of Faraday and
Helmholtz and Kelvin.
CLXXXVII
Of the affliction caused by persons who think that what they have picked
up from popular exposition qualifies them for discussing the great
problems of science, it may be said, as the Radical toast said of the
power of the Crown in bygone days, that it﹃has increased, is increasing,
and ought to be diminished.﹄The oddities of "English as she is spoke"
might be abundantly paralleled by those of﹃Science as she is
misunderstood﹄in the sermon, the novel, and the leading article; and a
collection of the grotesque travesties of scientific conceptions, in the
shape of essays on such trifles as "the Nature of Life" and the﹃Origin of
All Things,﹄which reach me, from time to time, might well be bound up
with them.
CLXXXVIII
The essay on Geological Reform unfortunately brought me, I will not say
into collision, but into a position of critical remonstrance with regard
to some charges of physical heterodoxy, brought by my distinguished friend
Lord Kelvin, against British Geology. As President of the Geological
Society of London at that time (1869), I thought I might venture to plead
that we were not such heretics as we seemed to be; and that, even if we
were, recantation would not affect the question of evolution.
I am glad to see that Lord Kelvin has just reprinted his reply to my plea,
and I refer the reader to it. I shall not presume to question anything,
that on such ripe consideration, Lord Kelvin has to say upon the physical
problems involved. But I may remark that no one can have asserted more
strongly than I have done, the necessity of looking to physics and
mathematics, for help in regard to the earliest history of the globe.
And I take the opportunity of repeating the opinion that, whether what we
call geological time has the lower limit assigned to it by Lord Kelvin, or
the higher assumed by other philosophers; whether the germs of all living
things have originated in the globe itself, or whether they have been
imported on, or in, meteorites from without, the problem of the origin of
those successive Faunae and Florae of the earth, the existence of which is
fully demonstrated by palaeontology, remains exactly where it was.
For I think it will be admitted, that the germs brought to us by
meteorites, if any, were not ova of elephants, nor of crocodiles; not
cocoa-nuts nor acorns; not even eggs of shell-fish and corals; but only
those of the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life. Therefore, since
it is proved that, from a very remote epoch of geological time, the earth
has been peopled by a continual succession of the higher forms of animals
and plants, these either must have been created, or they have arisen by
evolution. And in respect of certain groups of animals, the
well-established facts of palaeontology leave no rational doubt that they
arose by the latter method.
In the second place, there are no data whatever, which justify the
biologist in assigning any, even approximately definite, period of time,
either long or short, to the evolution of one species from another by the
process of variation and selection. In the essay on Geological
Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life I have taken pains to prove
that the change of animals has gone on at very different rates in
different groups of living beings; that some types have persisted with
little change from the palaeozoic epoch till now, while others have
changed rapidly within the limits of an epoch. In 1862 (see Coll. Ess viii
pp. 303,304) in 1863 (vol ii., p 461) and again in 1864 (ibid., pp. 89-91)
I argued, not as a matter of speculation, but from palaeontological facts,
the bearing of which I believe, up to that time, had not been shown, that
any adequate hypothesis of the causes of evolution must be consistent with
progression, stationariness and retrogression, of the same type at
different epochs; of different types in the same epoch; and that Darwin's
hypothesis fulfilled these conditions.
According to that hypothesis, two factors are at work, variation and
selection. Next to nothing is known of the causes of the former process;
nothing whatever of the time required for the production of a certain
amount of deviation from the existing type. And, as respects selection,
which operates by extinguishing all but a small minority of variations, we
have not the slightest means of estimating the rapidity with which it does
its work. All that we are justified in saying is that the rate at which it
takes place may vary almost indefinitely. If the famous paint-root of
Florida, which kills white pigs but not black ones, were abundant and
certain in its action, black pigs might be substituted for white in the
course of two or three years. If, on the other hand, it was rare and
uncertain in action, the white pigs might linger on for centuries.
CLXXXIX
A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few
passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming
mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth
of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to
read, with your own eyes, to-night. Let me add, that few chapters of human
history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words
well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the
bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket,
though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his
knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a
better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to
it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of
humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.
CXC
The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of the manner
in which the components of the chalk are arranged, and of their relative
proportions. But, by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water and then
pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different
degrees of fineness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be
pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic
examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining the
views obtained in these various methods, each of the rounded bodies may be
proved to be a beautifully-constructed calcareous fabric, made up of a
number of chambers, communicating freely with one another. The chambered
bodies are of various forms. One of the commonest is something like a
badly-grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly globular
chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called Globigerina,
and some specimens of chalk consist of little else than Globigerinæ
and granules. Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It is
the spoor of the game we are tracking. If we can learn what it is and what
are the conditions of its existence, we shall see our way to the origin
and past history of the chalk.
CXCI
It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the Globigerinæ
of the chalk, are being formed, at the present moment, by minute living
creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literally more numerous than the
sands of the sea-shore, over a large extent of that part of the earth's
surface which is covered by the ocean.
The history of the discovery of these living Globigerinæ and
of the part which they play in rock building, is singular enough. It is a
discovery which, like others of no less scientific importance, has arisen,
incidentally, out of work devoted to very different and exceedingly
practical interests. When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned
to look out for shoals and rocks; and the more the burthen of their ships
increased, the more imperatively necessary it became for sailors to
ascertain with precision the depth of the waters they traversed. Out of
this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding line; and,
ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts
and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon
charts.
CXCII
Lieut Brooke, of the American Navy, some years ago invented a most
ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial
layer of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth
to which the lead descends. In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the
bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at a
depth of more than 10,000 feet, or two miles, by the help of this sounding
apparatus. The specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg of Berlin,
and to Bailey of West Point, and those able microscopists found that this
deep-sea mud was almost entirety composed of the skeletons of living
organisms—the greater proportion of these being just like the Globigerinæ
already known to occur in the chalk.
Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the interests of science,
but Lieut Brooke's method of sounding acquired a high commercial value,
when the enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable between this
country and the United States was undertaken. For it became a matter of
immense importance to know, not only the depth of the sea over the whole
line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exact nature of the
bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting or fraying the strands
of that costly rope. The Admiralty consequently ordered Captain Dayman, an
old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain the depth over the whole
line of the cable, and to bring back specimens of the bottom. In former
days, such a command as this might have sounded very much like one of the
impossible things which the young Prince in the Fairy Tales is ordered to
do before he can obtain the hand of the Princess. However, in the months
of June and July, 1857, my friend performed the task assigned to nim with
great expedition and precision, without, so far as I know, having met with
any reward of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud which he procured
were sent to me to be examined and reported upon.
CXCIII
The result of all these operations is, that we know the contours and the
nature of the surface-soil covered by the North Atlantic for a distance of
1,700 miles from east to west, as well as we know that of any part of the
dry land. It is a prodigious plain-one of the widest and most even plains
in the world. If the sea were drained off, you might drive a waggon all
the way from Valentia, on the west coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay in
Newfoundland. And, except upon one sharp incline about 200 miles from Valentia,
I am not quite sure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so
gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long route. From Valentia
the road would lie down-hill for about 200 miles to the point at which the
bottom is now covered by 1,700 fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the
central plain, more than a thousand miles wide, the inequalities of the
surface of which would be hardly perceptible, though the depth of water
upon it now varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are places in
which Mont Blanc might be sunk without showing its peak above water.
Beyond this, the ascent on the American side commences, and gradually
leads, for about 300 miles, to the Newfoundland shore.
CXCIV
When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct
species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the
chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now met
with only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any one
of them inhabited fresh water—the collateral evidence that the chalk
represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the proof
derived from the nature of the chalk itself. I think you will now allow
that I did not overstate my case when I asserted that we have as strong
grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry land, at present
occupied by the chalk, was once at the bottom of the sea, as we have for
any matter of history whatever; while there is no justification for any
other belief.
No less certain it is that the time during which the countries we now call
south-east England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria,
were more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was of considerable
duration. We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a
thousand feet thick. I think you will agree with me that it must have
taken some time for the skeletons of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch
in diameter to heap up such a mass as that.
CXCV
If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin; the attachment, growth
to maturity, and decay of the Crania; and the subsequent attachment
and growth of the coralline, took a year (which is a low-estimate enough),
the accumulation of the inch of chalk must have taken more than a year:
and the deposit of a thousand feet of chalk must, consequently, have taken
more than twelve thousand years.
CXCVI
There is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may
read it. It tells us, with an authority which cannot be impeached, that
the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and remained dry land,
until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game the spoils
of which have rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in that
condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges"
in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of
generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots
and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the
icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay.
Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north,
paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of the
fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at
length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil
of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver
replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the
history of England dawned.
CXCVII
Direct proof may be given that some parts of the land of the northern
hemisphere are at this moment insensibly rising and others insensibly
sinking; and there is indirect, but perfectly satisfactory, proof, that an
enormous area now covered by the Pacific has been deepened thousands of
feet, since the present inhabitants of that sea came into existence. Thus
there is not a shadow of a reason for believing that the physical changes
of the globe, in past times, have been effected by other than natural
causes.
CXCVIII
A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit
of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning
hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this
physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of
our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought
to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the
abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the
evolution of the earth. And in the shifting﹃without haste, but without
rest﹄of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms
assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product
of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.
CXCIX
In certain parts of the sea bottom in the immediate vicinity of the
British Islands, as in the Clyde district, among the Hebrides, in the
Moray Firth, and in the German Ocean, there are depressed areæ,
forming a kind of submarine valleys, the centres of which are from 80 to
100 fathoms, or more, deep. These depressions are inhabited by assemblages
of marine animals, which differ from those found over the adjacent and
shallower region, and resemble those which are met with much farther
north, on the Norwegian coast. Forbes called these Scandinavian
detachments "Northern outliers."
How did these isolated patches of a northern population get into these
deep places? To explain the mystery, Forbes called to mind the fact that,
in the epoch which immediately preceded the present, the climate was much
colder (whence the name of "glacial epoch" applied to it); and that the
shells which are found fossil, or sub-fossil, in deposits of that age are
precisely such as are now to be met with only in the Scandinavian, or
still more Arctic, regions. Undoubtedly, during the glacial epoch, the
general population of our seas had, universally, the northern aspect which
is now presented only by the "northern outliers"; just as the vegetation
of the land, down to the sea-level, had the northern character which is,
at present, exhibited only by the plants which live on the tops of our
mountains. But, as the glacial epoch passed away, and the present climatal
conditions were developed, the northern plants were able to maintain
themselves only on the bleak heights, on which southern forms could not
compete with them. And, in like manner, Forbes suggested that, after the
glacial epoch, the northern animals then inhabiting the sea became
restricted to the deeps in which they could hold their own against
invaders from the south, better fitted than they to flourish in the warmer
waters of the shallows. Thus depth in the sea corresponded in its effect
upon distribution to height on the land.
CC
Among the scientific instructions for the voyage* drawn up by a committee
of the Royal Society, there is a remarkable letter from Von Humboldt to
Lord Minto, then First Lord of the Admiralty, in which, among other
things, he dwells upon the significance of the researches into the
microscopic composition of rocks, and the discovery of the great share
which microscopic organisms take in the formation of the crust of the
earth at the present day, made by Ehrenberg in the years 1836-39.
Ehrenberg, in fact, had shown that the extensive beds of "rotten-stone" or
"Tripoli" which occur in various parts of the world, and notably at Bilin
in Bohemia, consisted of accumulations of the silicious cases and
skeletons of Diatomaceæ sponges, and Radiolaria; he
had proved that similar deposits were being formed by Diatomaceæ, in
the pools of the Thiergarten in Berlin and elsewhere, and had pointed out
that, if it were commercially worth while, rotten-stone might be
manufactured by a process of diatom-culture. Observations conducted at
Cuxhaven, in 1839, had revealed the existence, at the surface of the
waters of the Baltic, of living Diatoms and Radiolaria of the same
species as those which, in a fossil state, constitute extensive rocks of
tertiary age at Caltanisetta, Zante, and Oran, on the shores of the
Mediterranean.
* Of the Challenger.
Moreover, in the fresh-water rotten-stone beds of Bilin, Ehrenberg had
traced out the metamorphosis, effected apparently by the action of
percolating water, of the primitively loose and friable deposit of
organized particles, in which the silex exists in the hydrated or soluble
condition. The silex, in fact undergoes solution and slow redeposition,
until, in ultimate result, the excessively finegrained sand, each particle
of which is a skeleton, becomes converted into a dense opaline stone, with
only here and there an indication of an organism.
From the consideration of these facts, Ehrenberg, as early as the year
1839, had arrived at the conclusion that rocks, altogether similar to
those which constitute a large part of the crust of the earth, must be
forming, at the present day, at the bottom of the sea; and he threw out
the suggestion that even where no trace of organic structure is to be
found in the older rocks, it may have been lost by metamorphosis.
CCI
It is highly creditable to the ingenuity of our ancestors that the
peculiar property of fermented liquids, in virtue of which they﹃make glad
the heart of man,﹄seems to have been known in the remotest periods of
which we have any record. All savages take to alcoholic fluids as if they
were to the manner born. Our Vedic forefathers intoxicated themselves with
the juice of the "soma"; Noah, by a not unnatural reaction against a
superfluity of water, appears to have taken the earliest practicable
opportunity of qualifying that which he was obliged to drink; and the
ghosts of the ancient Egyptians were solaced by pictures of banquets in
which the wine-cup passes round, graven on the walls of their tombs. A
knowledge of the process of fermentation, therefore, was in all
probability possessed by the prehistoric populations of the globe; and it
must have become a matter of great interest even to primaeval wine-bibbers
to study the methods by which fermented liquids could be surely
manufactured. No doubt it was soon discovered that the most certain, as
well as the most expeditious, way of making a sweet juice ferment was to
add to it a little of the scum, or lees, of another fermenting juice. And
it can hardly be questioned that this singular excitation of fermentation
in one fluid, by a sort of infection, or inoculation, of a little ferment
taken from some other fluid, together with the strange swelling, foaming,
and hissing of the fermented substance, must have always attracted
attention from the more thoughtful. Nevertheless, the commencement of the
scientific analysis of the Sphenomena dates from a period not earlier than
the first half of the seventeenth century. At this time, Van Helmont made
a first step, by pointing out that the peculiar hissing and bubbling of a
fermented liquid is due, not to the evolution of common air (which he, as
the inventor of the term "gas," calls "gas ventosum"), but to that of a
peculiar kind of air such as is occasionally met with in caves, mines, and
wells, and which he calls "gas sylvestre."
But a century elapsed before the nature of this "gas sylvestre," or as it
was afterwards called, "fixed air," was clearly determined, and it was
found to be identical with that deadly "choke-damp" by which the lives of
those who descend into old wells, or mines, or brewers' vats, are
sometimes suddenly ended; and with the poisonous aeriform fluid which is
produced by the combustion of charcoal, and now goes by the name of
carbonic acid gas.
During the same time it gradually became evident that the presence of
sugar was essential to the production of alcohol and the evolution of
carbonic acid gas, which are the two great and conspicuous products of
fermentation. And finally, in 1787, the Italian chemist, Fabroni, made the
capital discovery that the yeast ferment, the presence of which is
necessary to fermentation, is what he termed a "vegeto-animal" substance;
that is, a body which gives off ammoniacal salts when it is burned, and
is, in other ways, similar to the gluten of plants and the albumen and
casein of animals.
CCII
The living club-mosses are, for the most part, insignificant and creeping
herbs, which, superficially, very closely resemble true mosses, and none
of them reach more than two or three feet in height. But, in their
essential structure, they very closely resemble the earliest
Lepidodendroid trees of the coal: their stems and leaves are similar; so
are their cones; and no less like are the sporangia and spores; while even
in their size, the spores of the Lepidodendron and those of the
existing Lycopodium, or club-moss, very closely approach one
another.
Thus, the singular conclusion is forced upon us, that the greater and the
smaller sacs of the "Better-Bed" and other coals, in which the primitive
structure is well preserved, are simply the sporangia and spores of
certain plants, many of whicn were closely allied to the existing
club-mosses. And if, as I believe, it can be demonstrated that ordinary
coal Is nothing but "saccular" coal which has undergone a certain amount
of that alteration which, if continued, would convert it into anthracite;
then, the conclusion is obvious, that the great mass of the coal we burn
is the result of the accumulation of the spores and spore-cases of plants,
other parts of which have furnished the carbonized stems and the mineral
charcoal, or have left their impressions on the surfaces of the layer.
CCIII
The position of the beds which constitute the coal-measures is infinitely
diverse. Sometimes they are tilted up vertically, sometimes they are
horizontal, sometimes curved into great basins; sometimes they come to the
surface, sometimes they are covered up by thousands of feet of rock. But,
whatever then-present position, there is abundant and conclusive evidence
that every under-clay was once a surface soil. Not only do carbonized
root-fibres frequently abound in these under-clays; but the stools of
trees, the trunks of which are broken off and confounded with the bed of
coal, have been repeatedly found passing into radiating roots, still
embedded in the under-clay. On many parts of the coast of England, what
are commonly known as "submarine forests" are to be seen at low water.
They consist, for the most part, of short stools of oak, beech, and
fir-trees, still fixed by their long roots in the bed of blue clay in
which they originally grew. If one of these submarine forest beds should
be gradually depressed and covered up by new deposits, it would present
just the same characters as an under-clay of the coal, if the Sigillaria
and Lepidodendron of the ancient world were substituted for the
oak, or the beech, of our own times.
In a tropical forest, at the present day, the trunks of fallen trees, and
the stools of such trees as may have been broken by the violence of
storms, remain entire for but a short time. Contrary to what might be
expected, the dense wood of the tree decays, and suffers from the ravages
of insects, more swiftly than the bark. And the traveller, setting his
foot on a prostrate trunk, finds that it is a mere shell, which breaks
under his weight, and lands his foot amidst the insects, or the reptiles,
which have sought food or refuge within.
CCIV
The coal accumulated upon the area covered by one of the great forests of
the carboniferous epoch would, in course of time, have been wasted away by
the small, but constant, wear and tear of rain and streams, had the land
which supported it remained at the same level, or been gradually raised to
a greater elevation. And, no doubt, as much coal as now exists has been
destroyed, after its formation, in this way.
CCV
Once more, an invariably-recurring lesson of geological history, at
whatever point its study is taken up: the lesson of the almost infinite
slowness of the modification of living forms. The lines of the pedigrees
of living things break off almost before they begin to converge.
CCVI
Yet another curious consideration. Let us suppose that one of the stupid,
salamander-like Labyrinthodonts, which pottered, with much belly and
little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the coal-forests, could
have had thinking power enough in his small brain to reflect upon the
showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries, while
perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and
reproduced the organism which gave it birth: surely he might have been
excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and wanton extravagance which
Nature displayed in her operations.
But we have the advantage over our shovel-headed predecessor—or
possibly ancestor—and can perceive that a certain vein of thrift
runs through this apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry, and
seems to have had always before her eyes the adage,﹃Keep a thing long
enough, and you will find a use for it.﹄She has kept her beds of coal
many millions of years without being able to find much use for them; she
has sent them down beneath the sea, and the sea-beasts could make nothing
of them; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid the black veins
bare, and still, for ages and ages, there was no living thing on the face
of the earth that could see any sort of value in them; and it was only the
other day, so to speak, that she turned a new creature out of her
workshop, who by degrees acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and then
to discover that the black rock would burn.
I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius Cæsar was
good enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the
primæval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known that the
strange black stone, of which he found lumps here and there in his
wanderings, would burn, and so help to warm his body and cook his food.
Saxon, Dane, and Norman swarmed into the land. The English people grew
into a powerful nation, and Nature still waited for a full return of the
capital she had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The eighteenth
century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain of that man was the
spore out of which was developed the modern steam-engine, and all the
prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of
this. But coal is as much an essential condition of this growth and
development as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Wanting coal, we
could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have
worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the engines, and
the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream.
Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can
live where now ten thousand are amply supported.
Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's
interest upon her investment in club-mosses, and the like, so long ago.
But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this interest?
Heat comes out of it, light comes out of it; and if we could gather
together all that goes up the chimney, and all that remains in the grate
of a thoroughly-burnt coal-fire, we should find ourselves in possession of
a quantity of carbonic acid, water, ammonia, and mineral matters, exactly
equal in weight to the coal. But these are the very matters with which
Nature supplied the club-mosses which made the coal. She is paid back
principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the
carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding
with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal,
but most notable of housekeepers!
CCVII
Here, then, is a capital fact. The movements of the lobster are due to
muscular contractility. But why does a muscle contract at one time and not
at another? Why does one whole group of muscles contract when the lobster
wishes to extend his tail and another group when he desires to bend it?
What is it originates, directs, and controls the motive power?
Experiment, the great instrument for the ascertainment of truth in
physical science, answers this question for us. In the head of the lobster
there lies a small mass of that peculiar tissue which is known as nervous
substance. Cords of similar matter connect this brain of the lobster,
directly or indirectly, with the muscles. Now, if these communicating
cords are cut, the brain remaining entire, the power of exerting what we
call voluntary motion m the parts below the section is destroyed; and, on
the other hand, if, the cords remaining entire, the brain mass be
destroyed, the same voluntary mobility is equally lost, whence the
inevitable conclusion is, that the power of originating these motions
resides in the brain and is propagated along the nervous cords.
In the higher animals the phenomena which attend this transmission have
been investigated, and the exertion of the peculiar energy which resides
in the nerves has been found to be accompanied by a disturbance of the
electrical state of their molecules.
If we could exactly estimate the signification of this disturbance; if we
could obtain the value of a given exertion of nerve force by determining
the quantity of electricity, or of heat, of which it is the equivalent; if
we could ascertain upon what arrangement, or other condition of the
molecules of matter, the manifestation of the nervous and muscular
energies depends (and doubtless science will some day or other ascertain
these points), physiologists would have attained their ultimate goal in
this direction; they would have determined the relation of the motive
force of animals to the other forms of force found in nature; and if the
same process had been successfully performed for all the operations which
are carried on in, and by, the animal frame, physiology would be perfect,
and the facts of morphology and distribution would be deducible from the
laws which physiologists had established, combined with those determining
the condition of the surrounding universe.
CCVIII
The object of lectures is, in the first place, to awaken the attention and
excite the enthusiasm of the student; and this, I am sure, may be effected
to a far greater extent by the oral discourse and by the personal
influence of a respected teacher than in any other way. Secondly, lectures
have the double use of guiding the student to the salient points of a
subject, and at the same time forcing him to attend to the whole of it,
and not merely to that part which takes his fancy. And lastly, lectures
afford the student the opportunity of seeking explanations of those
difficulties which will, and indeed ought to, arise in the course of his
studies.
CCIX
What books shall I read? is a question constantly put by the student to
the teacher. My reply usually is,﹃None: write your notes out carefully
and fully; strive to understand them thoroughly; come to me for the
explanation of anything you cannot understand; and I would rather you did
not distract your mind by reading.﹄A properly composed course of lectures
ought to contain fully as much matter as a student can assimilate in the
time occupied by its delivery; and the teacher should always recollect
that his business is to feed and not to cram the intellect. Indeed, I
believe that a student who gains from a course of lectures the simple
habit of concentrating his attention upon a definitely limited series of
facts, until they are thoroughly mastered, has made a step of immeasurable
importance.
CCX
However good lectures may be, and however extensive the course of
reading-by which they are followed up, they are but accessories to the
great instrument of scientific teaching—demonstration. If I insist
unweariedly, nay fanatically, upon the importance of physical science as
an educational agent, it is because the study of any branch of science, if
properly conducted, appears to me to fill up a void left by all other
means of education. I have the greatest respect and love for literature;
nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a
very prominent branch of education: indeed, I wish that real literary
discipline were far more attended to than it is; but I cannot shut my eyes
to the fact that there is a vast difference between men who have had a
purely literary, and those who have had a sound scientific, training.
CCXI
In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the
source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are
distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the
latter.
CCXII
All that literature has to bestow may be obtained by reading and by
practical exercise in writing and in speaking; but I do not exaggerate
when I say that none of the best gifts of science are to be won by these
means. On the contrary, the great benefit which a scientific education
bestows, whether as training or as knowledge, is dependent upon the extent
to which the mind of the student is brought into immediate contact with
facts—upon the degree to which he learns the habit of appealing
directly to Nature, and of acquiring through his senses concrete images of
those properties of things, which are, and always will be, but
approximatively expressed in human language. Our way of looking at Nature,
and of speaking about her, varies from year to year; but a fact once seen,
a relation of cause and effect, once demonstratively apprehended, are
possessions which neither change nor pass away, but, on the contrary, form
fixed centres, about which other truths aggregate by natural affinity.
Therefore, the great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the
fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the
mind, but by sensible impressions upon tne eye, and ear, and touch of the
student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated,
should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or
other, facts which furnished the demonstration of the law, or the
illustration of the term.
CCXIII
What is the purpose of primary intellectual education? I apprehend that
its first object is to train the young in the use of those tools wherewith
men extract knowledge from the ever-shifting; succession of phenomena
which pass before their eyes; and that its second object is to inform them
of the fundamental laws which have been found by experience to govern the
course of things, so that they may not be turned out into the world naked,
defenceless, and a prey to the events they might control.
A boy is taught to read his own and other languages, in order that he may
have access to infinitely wider stores of knowledge than could ever be
opened to him by oral intercourse with his fellow men; he learns to write,
that his means of communication with the rest of mankind may be
indefinitely enlarged, and that he may record and store up the knowledge
he acquires. He is taught elementary mathematics, that he may understand
all those relations of number and form, upon which the transactions of
men, associated in complicated societies, are built, and that he may have
some practice in deductive reasoning.
All these operations of reading, writing, and ciphering are intellectual
tools, whose use should, before all things, be learned, and learned
thoroughly; so that the youth may be enabled to make his life that which
it ought to be, a continual progress in learning and in wisdom.
CCXIV
In addition, primary education endeavours to fit a boy out with a certain
equipment of positive knowledge. He is taught the great laws of morality;
the religion of his sect; so much history and geography as will tell him
where the great countries of the world are, what they are, and now they
have become what they are.
But if I regard it closely, a curious reflection arises. I suppose that,
fifteen hundred years ago, the child of any well-to-do Roman citizen was
taught just these same things; reading and writing in his own, and,
perhaps, the Greek tongue; the elements of mathematics; and the religion,
morality, history, and geography current in his time. Furthermore, I do
not think I err in affirming that, if such a Christian Roman boy, who had
finished his education, could be transplanted into one of our public
schools, and pass through its course of instruction, he would not meet
with a single unfamiliar line of thought; amidst all the new facts he
would have to learn, not one would suggest a different mode of regarding
the universe from that current in his own time.
And yet surely there is some great difference between the civilisation of
the fourth century and that of the nineteenth, and still more between the
intellectual habits and tone of thought of that day and this?
And what has made this difference? I answer fearlessly—The
prodigious development of physical science within the last two centuries.
CCXV
Modern civilisation rests upon physical science; take away her gifts to
our own country, and our position among the leading nations of the world
is gone to-morrow; for it is physical science only that makes intelligence
and moral energy stronger than brute force.
CCXVI
The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; it has made its way
into the works of our best poets, and even the mere man of letters, who
affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with
her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods. I believe
that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now
slowly taking place by her agency. She is teaching the world that the
ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority;
she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating a
firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and physical
laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aim of an
intelligent being.
But of all this your old stereotyped system of education takes no note.
Physical science, its methods, its problems, and its difficulties, will
meet the poorest boy at every turn, and yet we educate him in such a
manner that he shall enter the world as ignorant of the existence of the
methods and facts of science as the day he was born. The modern world is
full of artillery; and we turn out our children to do battle in it,
equipped with the shield and sword of an ancient gladiator.
CCXVII
Posterity will cry shame on us if we do not remedy this deplorable state
of things. Nay, if we live twenty years longer, our own consciences will
cry shame on us.
It is my firm conviction that the only way to remedy it is to make the
elements of physical science an integral part of primary education. I have
endeavoured to show you how that may be done for that branch of science
which it is my business to pursue; and I can but add, that I should look
upon the day when every schoolmaster throughout this land was a centre of
genuine, however rudimentary, scientific knowledge as an epoch in the
history of the country.
But let me entreat you to remember my last words. Addressing myself to
you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is a
sham and a delusion—what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors,
that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal
acquaintance with the facts, be they few or many.
CCXVIII
The first distinct enunciation of the hypothesis that all living matter
has sprung from pre-existing living matter came from a contemporary,
though a junior, of Harvey, a native of that country, fertile in men great
in all departments of human activity, which was to intellectual Europe, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what Germany is in the
nineteenth. It was in Italy, and from Italian teachers, that Harvey
received the most important part of his scientific education. And it was a
student trained in the same schools, Francesco Redi—a man of the
widest knowledge and most versatile abilities, distinguished alike as
scholar, poet, physician and, naturalist—who, just two hundred and
two years ago,* published his﹃Esperienze intorno alia Generazione
degl'Insetti,﹄and gave to the world the idea, the growth of which it is
my purpose to trace. Redi's book went through five editions in twenty
years; and the extreme simplicity of his experiments, and the clearness of
his arguments, gained for his views and for their consequences, almost
universal acceptance.
Redi did not trouble himself much with speculative considerations, but
attacked particular cases of what was supposed to be﹃spontaneous
generation﹄experimentally. Here are dead animals, or pieces of meat, says
he; I expose them to the air in hot weather, and in a few days they swarm
with maggots. You tell me that these are generated in the dead flesh; but
if I put similar bodies, while quite fresh, into a jar, and tie some fine
gauze over the top of the jar, not a maggot makes its appearance, while
the dead substances, nevertheless, putrefy just in the same way as before.
It is obvious, therefore, that the maggots are not generated by the
corruption of the meat; and that the cause of their formation must be a
something which is kept away by gauze. But gauze will not keep away
aeriform bodies, or fluids. This something must therefore, exist in the
form of solid particles too big to get through the gauze. Nor is one long
left in doubt what these solid particles are; for the blow-flies,
attracted by the odour of the meat, swarm round the vessel, and, urged by
a powerful but in this case misleading instinct, lay eggs out of which
maggots are immediately hatched, upon the gauze. The conclusion,
therefore, is unavoidable; the maggots are not generated by the meat, but
the eggs which give rise to them are brought through the air by the flies.
* These words were written in 1870.
These experiments seem almost childishly simple, and one wonders how it
was that no one ever thought of them before. Simple as they are, however,
they are worthy of the most careful study, for every piece of experimental
work since done, in regard to this subject, has been shaped upon the model
furnished by the Italian philosopher. As the results of his experiments
were the same, however varied the nature of the materials he used, it is
not wonderful that there arose in Redi's mind a presumption that, in all
such cases of the seeming production of life from dead matter, the real
explanation was the introduction of living germs from without into that
dead matter. And thus the hypothesis that living matter always arises by
the agency of pre-existing living matter, took definite shape; and had,
henceforward, a right to be considered and a claim to be refuted, in each
particular case, before the production of living matter in any other way
could be admitted by careful reasoners. It will be necessary for me to
refer to this hypothesis so frequently, that, to save circumlocution, I
shall call it the hypothesis of Biogenesis; and I shall term the
contrary doctrine—that living matter may be produced by not living
matter—the hypothesis of Abiogenesis.
In the seventeenth century, as I have said, the latter was the dominant
view, sanctioned alike by antiquity and by authority; and it is
interesting to observe that Redi did not escape the customary tax upon a
discoverer of having to defend himself against the charge of impugning the
authority of the Scriptures; for his adversaries declared that the
generation of bees from the carcase of a dead lion is affirmed, in the
Book of Judges, to have been the origin of the famous riddle with which
Samson perplexed the Philistines:—
"Out of the cater came forth meat,
And out of the strong came forth sweetness"
CCXIX
The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis
by an ugly fact.
CCXX
It remains yet in the order of logic, though not of history, to show that
among these solid destructible particles there really do exist germs
capable of giving rise to the development of living forms in suitable
menstrua. This piece of work was done by M. Pasteur in those beautiful
researches which will ever render his name famous; and which, in spite of
all attacks upon them, appear to me now, as they did seven years ago, to
be models of accurate experimentation and logical reasoning. He strained
air through cotton-wool, and found, as Schroeder and Dusch had done, that
it contained nothing competent to give rise to the development of life in
fluids highly fitted for that purpose. But the important further links in
the chain of evidence added by Pasteur are three. In the first place he
subjected to microscopic examination the cottonwool which had served as
strainer, and found that sundry bodies clearly recognisable as germs were
among the solid particles strained off. Secondly, he proved that these
germs were competent to give rise to living forms by simply sowing them in
a solution fitted for their development. And, thirdly, he showed that the
incapacity of air strained through cotton-wool to give rise to life was
not due to any occult change effected in the constituents of the air by
the wool, by proving that the cotton-wool might be dispensed with
altogether, and perfectly free access left between the exterior air and
that in the experimental flask. If the neck of the flask is drawn out into
a tube and bent downwards; and if, after the contained fluid has been
carefully boiled, the tube is heated sufficiently to destroy any germs
which may be present in the air which enters as the fluid cools, the
apparatus may be left to itself for any time and no life will appear in
the fluid. The reason is plain. Although there is free communication
between the atmosphere laden with germs and the germless air in the flask,
contact between the two takes place only in the tube; and as the germs
cannot fall upwards, and there are no currents, they never reach the
interior of the flask. But if the tube be broken short off where it
proceeds from the flask, and free access be thus given to germs falling
vertically out of the air, the fluid, which has remained clear and desert
for months, becomes, in a few days, turbid and full of life.
CCXXI
In autumn it is not uncommon to see flies motionless upon a window-pane,
with a sort of magic circle, in white, drawn round them. On microscopic
examination, the magic circle is found to consist of innumerable spores,
which have been thrown off in all directions by a minute fungus called Empusa
museæ the spore-forming filaments of which stand out like a pile
of velvet from the body of the fly. These spore-forming filaments are
connected with others which fill the interior of the fly's body like so
much fine wool, having eaten away and destroyed the creature's viscera.
This is the full-grown condition of the Empusa. If traced back to
its earliest stages, in flies which are still active, and to all
appearance healthy, it is found to exist in the form of minute corpuscles
which float in the blood of the fly. These multiply and lengthen into
filaments, at the expense of the fly's substance; and when they have at
last killed the patient, they grow out of its body and give off spores.
Healthy flies shut up with diseased ones catch this mortal disease, and
perish like the others. A most competent observer, M. Cohn, who studied
the development of the Empusa very carefully, was utterly unable to
discover in what manner the smallest germs of the Empusa got into
the fly. The spores could not be made to give rise to such germs by
cultivation; nor were such germs discoverable in the air, or in the food
of the fly. It looked exceedingly like a case of Abiogenesis, or, at any
rate, of Xenogenesis; and it is only quite recently that the real course
of events has been made out. It has been ascertained that when one of the
spores falls upon the body of a fly, it begins to germinate, and sends out
a process which bores its way through the fly's skin; this, having reached
the interior cavities of its body, gives off the minute floating
corpuscles which are the earliest stage of the Empusa. The disease
is "contagious", because a healthy fly coming in contact with a diseased
one, from which the spore-bearing filaments protrude, is pretty sure to
carry off a spore or two. It is "infectious" because the spores become
scattered about all sorts of matter m the neighbourhood of the slain
flies. Silkworms are liable to many diseases; and, even before 1853, a
peculiar epizootic, frequently accompanied by the appearance of dark spots
upon the skin (whence the name of "Pébrine" which it has received),
had been noted for its mortality. But in the years following 1853 this
malady broke out with such extreme violence, that, in 1858, the silk-crop
was reduced to a third of the amount which it had reached in 1853; and, up
till within the last year or two, it has never attained half the yield of
1853. This means not only that the great number of people engaged in silk
growing are some thirty millions sterling poorer than they might have
been; it means not only that high prices have had to be paid for imported
silkworm eggs, and that, after investing his money in them, in paying for
mulberry-leaves and for attendance, the cultivator has constantly seen his
silkworms perish and himself plunged in ruin; but it means that the looms
of Lyons have lacked employment, and that, for years, enforced idleness
and misery have been the portion of a vast population which, in former
days, was industrious and well-to-do.
In reading the Report made by M. de Quatrefages in 1859, it is exceedingly
interesting to observe that his elaborate study of the Pébrine
forced the conviction upon his mind that, in its mode of occurrence and
propagation, the disease of the silkworm is, in every respect, comparable
to the cholera among mankind. But it differs from the cholera, and so far
is a more formidable malady, in being hereditary, and in being, under some
circumstances, contagious as well as infectious.
The Italian naturalist, Filippi, discovered in the blood of the silkworms
affected by this strange disorder a multitude of cylindrical corpuscles,
each about 1/6000th of an inch long. These have been carefully studied by
Lebert, and named by him Panhistophyton; for the reason that in
subjects in which the disease is strongly developed, the corpuscles swarm
in every tissue and organ of the body, and even pass into the undeveloped
eggs of the female moth. But are these corpuscles causes, or mere
concomitants, of the disease? Some naturalists took one view and some
another; and it was not until the French Government, alarmed by the
continued ravages of the malady, and the inefficiency of the remedies
which had been suggested, despatched M. Pasteur to study it, that the
question received its final settlement; at a great sacrifice, not only of
the time and peace of mind of that eminent philosopher, but, I regret to
have to add, of his health.
But the sacrifice has not been in vain. It is now certain that this
devastating, cholera-like Pébrine is the effect of the growth and
multiplication of the Panhistophyton in the silkworm. It is
contagious and infectious, because the corpuscles of the Panhistophyton
pass away from the bodies of the diseased caterpillars, directly or
indirectly, to the alimentary canal of healthy silkworms in their
neighbourhood; it is hereditary because the corpuscles enter into the eggs
while they are being formed, and consequently are carried within them when
they are laid; and for this reason, also? it presents the very singular
peculiarity of being inherited only on the mother's side. There is not a
single one of all the apparently capricious and unaccountable phenomena
presented by the Pébrine, but has received its explanation from the
fact that the disease is the result of the presence of the microscopic
organism, Panhistophyton.
CCXXII
I commenced this Address by asking you to follow me in an attempt to trace
the path which has been followed by a scientific idea, in its long and
slow progress from the position of a probable hypothesis to that of an
established law of nature. Our survey has not taken us into very
attractive regions; it has lain, chiefly, in a land flowing with the
abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and mouldiness. And it may be
imagined with what smiles and shrugs, practical and serious contemporaries
of Redi and of Spallanzani may have commented on the waste of their high
abilities in toiling at the solution of problems which, though curious
enough in themselves, could be of no conceivable utility to mankind.
Nevertheless, you will have observed that before we had travelled very far
upon our road, there appeared, on the right hand and on the left, fields
laden with a harvest of golden grain, immediately convertible into those
things which the most solidly practical men will admit to have value—viz.,
money and life.
The direct loss to France caused by the Pébrine in seventeen years
cannot be estimated at less than fifty millions sterling; and if we add to
this what Redi's idea, in Pasteur's hands, has done for the wine-grower
and for the vinegar-maker; and try to capitalise its value, we shall find
that it will go a long way towards repairing; the money losses caused by
the frightful and calamitous war of this autumn (1870). And as to the
equivalent of Redi's thought in life, how can we overestimate the value of
that knowledge of the nature of epidemic and epizootic diseases, and
consequently of the means of checking, or eradicating them, the dawn of
which has assuredly commenced?
Looking back no further than ten years, it is possible to select three
(1863, 1864, and 1869) in which the total number of deaths from
scarlet-fever alone amounted to ninety thousand. That is the return of
killed, the maimed and disabled being left out of sight Why, it is to be
hoped that the list of killed in the present bloodiest of all wars will
not amount to more than this! But the facts which I have placed before you
must leave the least sanguine without a doubt that the nature and the
causes of this scourge will, one day, be as well understood as those of
the Pébrine are now; and that the long-suffered massacre of our
innocents will come to an end.
And thus mankind will have one more admonition that "the people perish for
lack of knowledge"; and that the alleviation of the miseries, and the
promotion of the welfare, of men must be sought, by those who will not
lose their pains, in that diligent, patient, loving study of all the
multitudinous aspects of Nature, the results of which constitute exact
knowledge, or Science.
CCXXIII
I find three, more or less contradictory, systems of geological thought,
each of which might fairly enough claim these appellations, standing side
by side in Britain. I shall call one of them Catastrophisim another
Uniformitarianism, the third Evolutionism; and I shall try briefly to
sketch the characters of each, that you may say whether the classification
is, or is not, exhaustive.
By Catastrophism I mean any form of geological speculation which, in order
to account for the phenomena of geology supposes the operation of forces
different in their nature, or immeasurably different in power, from those
which we at present see in action in the universe.
The Mosaic cosmogony is, in this sense, catastrophic, because it assumes
the operation of extra-natural power. The doctrine of violent upheavals,
débâcles and cataclysms in general, is catastrophic,
so far as it assumes that these were brought about by causes which have
now no parallel. There was a time when catastrophism might, pre-eminently,
have claimed the title of "British popular geology"; and assuredly it has
yet many adherents, and reckons among its supporters some of the most
honoured members of this Society.
By Uniformitarianism I mean especially the teaching of Hutton and of
Lyell.
That great though incomplete work, "The Theory of the Earth", seems to me
to be one of the most remarkable contributions to geology which is
recorded in the annals of the science. So far as the not-living world is
concerned, uniformitarianism lies there, not only in germ, but in blossom
and fruit.
If one asks how it is that Hutton was led to entertain views so far in
advance of those prevalent in his time, in some respects; while, in
others, they seem almost curiously limited, the answer appears to me to be
plain.
Hutton was in advance of the geological speculation of his time, because,
in the first place, he had amassed a vast store of knowledge of the facts
of geology, gathered by personal observation in travels of considerable
extent; and because, in the second place, he was thoroughly trained in the
physical and chemical science of his day, and thus possessed, as much as
any one in his time could possess it, the knowledge which is requisite for
the just interpretation of geological phenomena, and the habit of thought
which fits a man for scientific inquiry.
It is to this thorough scientific training that I ascribe Hutton's steady
and persistent refusal to look to other causes than those now in operation
for the explanation of geological phenomena.
The internal heat of the earth, the elevation and depression of its crust,
its belchings forth of vapours, ashes, and lava, are its activities, in as
strict a sense as are warmth and the movements and products of respiration
the activities of an animal. The phenomena of the seasons, of the trade
winds, of the Gulf-stream, are as much the results of the reaction between
these inner activities and outward forces as are the budding of the leaves
in spring and their falling in autumn the effects of the interaction
between the organisation of a plant and the solar light and heat. And, as
the study of the activities of the living being is called its physiology,
so are these phenomena the subject-matter of an analogous telluric
physiology, to which we sometimes give the name of meteorology, sometimes
that of physical geography, sometimes that of geology. Again, the earth
has a place in space and in time, and relations to other bodies in both
these respects, which constitute its distribution. This subject is usually
left to the astronomer; but a knowledge of its broad outlines seems to me
to be an essential constituent of the stock of geological ideas.
CCXXIV
All that can be ascertained concerning the structure succession of
conditions, actions, and position m space of the earth, is the matter of
fact of its natural history. But? as in biology, there remains the matter
of reasoning from these facts to their causes, which is just as much
science as the other, and indeed more; and this constitutes geological
aetiology.
CCXXV
I suppose that it would be very easy to pick holes in the details of
Kant's speculations, whether cosmo-logical, or specially telluric, in
their application. But for all that, he seems to me to have been the first
person to frame a complete system of geological speculation by founding
the doctrine of evolution.
I have said that the three schools of geological speculation which I have
termed Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Evolutionism, are commonly
supposed to be antagonistic to one another; and I presume it will have
become obvious that in my belief, the last is destined to swallow up the
other two. But it is proper to remark that each of the latter has kept
alive the tradition of precious truths.
To my mind there appears to be no sort of necessary theoretical antagonism
between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. On the contrary, it is very
conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me
illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of
uniform action; good time-keeping means uniformity of action. But the
striking of the clock is essentially a catastrophe; the hammer might be
made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water; and,
by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might
strike at all sorts of irregular periods, never twice alike, in the
intervals, force, or number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these
irregular, and apparently lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an
absolutely uniformitarian action; and we might have two schools of
clock-theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.
CCXXVI
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which
grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you
get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in tne
world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulæ
will not get a definite result out of loose data.
CCXXVII
The motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every
man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean between
self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his
circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this:
that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can be but
imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right solution
rarely presents itself, until that stern critic, aged experience, has been
furnished with ample justification for venting his sarcastic humour upon
the irreparable blunders we have already made.
CCXXVIII
That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but
the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are
among the transitory expressions. And in the living world, one of the most
characteristic features of this cosmic process is the struggle for
existence, the competition of each with all, the result of which is the
selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the
whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and
which are therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the
fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the
downs is seen in the turf, with its weed and gorse. Under the conditions,
they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have
proved that they are the fittest to survive.
CCXXIX
As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree
from its seed; or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and
all other kinds of supernatural intervention. As the expression of a fixed
order, every stage of which is the effect of causes operating according to
definite rules, the conception of evolution no less excludes that of
chance. It is very desirable to remember that evolution is not an
explanation of the cosmic process, but merely a generalized statement of
the method and results of that process. And, further, that, if there is
proof that the cosmic process was set going by any agent, then that agent
will be the creator of it and of all its products, although, supernatural
intervention may remain strictly excluded from its further course.
CCXXX
All plants and animals exhibit the tendency to vary, the causes of which
have yet to be ascertained; it is the tendency of the conditions of life,
at any given time, while favouring the existence of the variations best
adapted to them, to oppose that of the rest and thus to exercise
selection; and all living things tend to multiply without limit, while the
means of support are limited; the obvious cause of which is the production
of offspring more numerous than their progenitors, but with actual
expectation of life in the actuarial sense. Without tne first tendency
there could be no evolution. Without the second, there would be no good
reason why one variation should disappear and another take its place; that
is to say, there would be no selection. Without the third, the struggle
for existence, the agent of the selective process in the state of nature,
would vanish.
CCXXXI
The faith which is born of knowledge finds its object in an eternal order,
bringing forth ceaseless chance, through endless time, in endless space;
the manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating between phases of
potentiality and phases of explication.
CCXXXII
With all their enormous differences in natural endowment, men agree in one
thing, and that is their innate desire to enjoy the pleasures and escape
the pains of life; and, in short, to do nothing but that which it pleases
them to do, without the least reference to the welfare of the society into
which they are born. That is their inheritance (the reality at the bottom
of the doctrine of original sin) from the long series of ancestors, human
and semi-human and brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency to
self-assertion was the condition of victory in the struggle for existence.
That is the reason of the aviditas vitæ—the insatiable
hunger for enjoyment—of all mankind, which is one of the essential
conditions of success in the war with the state of nature outside; and yet
the sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free play within.
CCXXXIII
The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or natural liberty, which
is the necessary condition for the origin of human society, is the product
of organic necessities of a different land from those upon which the
constitution of the hive depends. One of these is the mutual affection of
parent and offspring, intensified by the long infancy of the human
species. But the most important is the tendency, so strongly developed in
man, to reproduce in himself actions and feelings similar to, or
correlated with, those of other men. Man is the most consummate of all
mimics in the animal world; none but himself can draw or model; none comes
near him in the scope, variety, and exactness of vocal imitation; none is
such a master of gesture; while he seems to be impelled thus to imitate
for the pure pleasure of it. And there is no such another emotional
chameleon. By a purely reflex operation of the mind, we take the hue of
passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the complementary
colour. It is not by any conscious "putting one's self in the place" of a
joyful or a suffering person that the state of mind we call sympathy
usually arises; indeed, it is often contrary to one's sense of right, and
in spite of one's will, that "fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind," or
the reverse. However complete may be the indifference to public opinion,
in a cool, intellectual view, of the traditional sage, it has not yet been
my fortune to meet with any actual sage who took its hostile
manifestations with entire equanimity. Indeed, I doubt if the philosopher
lives, or ever has lived, who could know himself to be heartily despised
by a street boy without some irritation. And, though one cannot justify
Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai on such a very high gibbet, yet,
really, the consciousness of the Vizier of Ahasuerus, as he went in and
out of the gate, that this obscure Jew had no respect for him, must have
been very annoying.
It is needful only to look around us, to see that the greatest restrainer
of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of the law, but of the
opinion of their fellows. The conventions of honour bad men who break
legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while people endure the extremity
of physical pain rather than part with life, shame drives the weakest to
suicide.
Every forward step of social progress brings men into closer relations
with their fellows, and increases the importance of the pleasures and
pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others by our own
sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of others, every
day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until associations, as
indissoluble as those of language, are formed between certain acts and the
feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It becomes impossible to
imagine some acts without disapprobation, or others without approbation of
the actor, whether he be one's self or anyone else. We come to think in
the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial personality, the﹃man
within,﹄as Adam Smith calls conscience, is built up beside the natural
personality. He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the
antisocial tendencies of the natural man within the limits required by
social welfare.
CCXXXIV
I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of which the primitive
bonds of human society are so largely forged, into the organized and
personified sympathy we call conscience, the ethical process. So far as it
tends to make any human society more efficient in the struggle for
existence with the state of nature, or with other societies, it works in
harmonious contrast with the cosmic process. But it is none the less true
that, since law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for existence
between men in society, the ethical process is in opposition to the
principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the
qualities best fitted for success in that struggle.
CCXXXV
Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending only to the relations
of men towards one another in an ideal society, have agreed upon the
"golden rule," "Do as you would be done by." In other words, let sympathy
be your guide; put yourself in the place of the man towards whom your
action is directed; and do to him what you would like to have done to
yourself under the circumstances. However much one may admire the
generosity of such a rule of conduct; however confident one may be that
average men may be thoroughly depended upon not to carry it out to its
full logical consequences; it is nevertheless desirable to recognise the
fact that these consequences are incompatible with the existence of a
civil state, under any circumstances of this world which have obtained,
or, so far as one can see, are likely to come to pass.
For I imagine there can be no doubt that the great desire of every
wrongdoer is to escape from the painful consequences of his actions. If I
put myself in the place of the man who has robbed me, I find that I am
possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or imprisoned; if in that
of the man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contemplate with
satisfaction the absence of any worse result than the turning of the other
cheek for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden rule" involves
the negation of law by the refusal to put it in motion against
law-breakers; and, as regards the external relations of a polity, it is
the refusal to continue the struggle for existence. It can be obeyed, even
partially, only under the protection of a society which repudiates it
without such shelter the followers of the "golden rule" may indulge in
hopes of heaven, but they must reckon with the certainty that other people
will be masters of the earth.
What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and
slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated if he were
in their place?
CCXXXVI
In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauperism have nothing to do
with heredity; but are the consequence, partly, of circumstances and,
partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under different conditions
of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration. It was a shrewd
man of the world who, in discussing sewage problems, remarked that dirt is
riches in the wrong; place; and that sound aphorism has moral
applications. The benevolence and open-handed generosity which adorn a
rich man may make a pauper of a poor one; the energy and courage to which
the successful soldier owes his rise, the cool and daring subtlety to
which the great financier owes his fortune, may very easily, under
unfavourable conditions, lead their possessors to the gallows, or to the
hulks. Moreover, it is fairly probable that the children of a "failure"
will receive from their other parent just that little modification of
character which makes all the difference. I sometimes wonder whether
people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever
dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be very "fit"
indeed not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when it
would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the "unfit."
CCXXXVII
In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the qualities which ensure
success are energy, industry, intellectual capacity, tenacity of purpose,
and, at least as much sympathy as is necessary to make a man understand
the feelings of his fellows. Were there none of those artificial
arrangements by which fools and knaves are kept at the top of society
instead of sinking to their natural place at the bottom, the struggle for
the means of enjoyment would ensure a constant circulation of the human
units of the social compound, from the bottom to the top and from the top
to the bottom. The survivors of the contest, those who continued to form
the great bulk of the polity, would not be those "fittest" who got to the
very top, but the great body of the moderately "fit," whose numbers and
superior propagative power enable them always to swamp the exceptionally
endowed minority.
I think it must be obvious to every one that, whether we consider the
internal or the external interests of society, it is desirable they should
be in the hands of those who are endowed with the largest share of energy,
of industry, of intellectual capacity, of tenacity of purpose, while they
are not devoid of sympathetic humanity; and, in so far as the struggle for
the means of enjoyment tends to place such men in possession of wealth and
influence, it is a process which tends to the good of society. But the
process, as we have seen, has no real resemblance to that which adapts
living beings to current conditions in the state of nature; nor any to the
artificial selection of the horticulturist.
CCXXXVIII
Even should the whole human race be absorbed in one vast polity, within
which "absolute political justice" reigns, the struggle for existence with
the state of nature outside it, and the tendency to the return of the
struggle within, in consequence of over-multiplication, will remain; and,
unless men's inheritance from the ancestors who fought a good fight in the
state of nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out by some method
at present unrevealed, at any rate to disbelievers in supernaturalism,
every child born into the world will still bring with him the instinct of
unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn the lesson of
self-restraint and renunciation. But the practice of self-restraint and
renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better.
That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of a vast amount of
improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his
intelligence to the adaptation of tne conditions of life to his higher
needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains
liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be
perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his
ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable
memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recognition of his
intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge his incapacity to
penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled
happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of
perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was
dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of
them.
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain
and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an
organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy
civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself,
until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its
downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more,
the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.
CCXXXIX
From very low forms up to the highest—in the animal no less than in
the vegetable kingdom—the process of life presents the same
appearance of cyclical evolution. Nay, we have but to cast our eyes over
the rest of the world and cyclical change presents itself on all sides. It
meets us in the water that flows to the sea and returns to the springs; in
the heavenly bodies that wax and wane, go and return to their places; in
the inexorable sequence of the ages of man's life; in that successive
rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and of states which is the most
prominent topic of civil history.
CCXL
As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same
water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible
world that it is. As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks them, the
predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has become the past; the
"is" should be "was." And the more we learn of the nature of things, the
more evident is it that what we call rest is only unperceived activity;
that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at every
moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of a transitory
adjustment of contending forces; a scene of strife, in which all the
combatants fall in turn. What is true of each part is true of the whole.
Natural knowledge tends more and more to the conclusion that﹃all the
choir of heaven and furniture of the earth﹄are the transitory forms of
parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of evolution, from
nebulous potentiality, through endless growths of sun and planet and
satellite; through all varieties of matter; through infinite diversities
of life and thought; possibly, through modes of being of which we neither
have a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable
latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the
cosmos is its impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much of a
permanent entity as of a changeful process, in which naught endures save
the flow of energy and the rational order which pervades it.
CCLXI
Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of the
sentient world, and has become the superb animal which he is in virtue of
his success in the struggle for existence. The conditions having been of a
certain order, man's organization has adjusted itself to them better than
mat of his competitors in the cosmic strife. In the case of mankind, the
self-assertion, the unscrupulous seizing upon all that can be grasped, the
tenacious holding of all that can be kept, which constitute the essence of
the struggle for existence, have answered. For his successful progress,
throughout the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those
qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger; his exceptional
physical organization; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and
his imitativeness; his ruthless and ferocious destructiveness when his
anger is roused by opposition.
But, in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to social organization,
and in proportion as civilization has grown in worth, these deeply
ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects. After the manner of
successful persons, civilized man would gladly kick down the ladder by
which he has climbed. He would be only too pleased to see﹃the ape and
tiger die.﹄But they decline to suit his convenience; and the unwelcome
intrusion of these boon companions of his hot youth into the ranged
existence of civil life adds pains and griefs, innumerable and
immeasurably great, to those which the cosmic process necessarily brings
on the mere animal. In fact, civilized man brands all these ape and tiger
promptings with the name of sins; he punishes many of the acts which flow
from them as crimes; and, in extreme cases, he does his best to put an end
to the survival of the fittest of former days by axe and rope.
CCXLII
In Hindustan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively high and tolerably
stable civilization had succeeded long ages of semi-barbarism and
struggle. Out of wealth and security had come leisure and refinement, and,
close at their heels, had followed the malady of thought. To the struggle
for bare existence, which never ends, though it may be alleviated and
partially disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the struggle to make
existence intelligible and to bring the order of things into harmony with
the moral sense of man, which also never ends, but, for the thinking few,
becomes keener with every increase of knowledge and with every step
towards the realization of a worthy ideal of life.
Two thousand five hundred years ago the value of civilization was as
apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in the
garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is capable of
bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that the blessings of
culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into a hothouse. The
stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly
multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the
intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of that especially
human faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting
present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, wherein men
dwell the more the higher their culture. But that very sharpening of the
sense and that subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a wealth
of pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional enlargement of the
capacity for suffering; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it
created new heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding
hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.
CCXLIII
One of the oldest and most important elements in such systems is the
conception of justice. Society is impossible unless those who are
associated agree to observe certain rules of conduct towards one another;
its stability depends on the steadiness with which they abide by that
agreement; and, so far as they waver, that mutual trust which is the bond
of society is weakened or destroyed. Wolves could not hunt in packs except
for the real, though unexpressed, understanding that they should not
attack one another during the chase. The most rudimentary polity is a pack
of men living under the like tacit, or expressed, understanding; and
having made the very important advance upon wolf society, that they agree
to use the force of the whole body against individuals who violate it and
in favour of those who observe it. This observance of a common
understanding, with the consequent distribution of punishments and rewards
according to accepted rules, received the name of justice, while the
contrary was called injustice. Early ethics did not take much note of the
animus of the violator of the rules. But civilization could not advance
far without the establishment of a capital distinction between the case of
involuntary and that of wilful misdeed; between a merely wrong action and
a guilty one.
And, with increasing refinement of moral appreciation, the problem of
desert, which arises out of this distinction, acquired more and more
theoretical and practical importance. If life must be given for life, yet
it was recognized that the unintentional slayer did not altogether deserve
death; and, by a sort of compromise between the public and the private
conception of justice, a sanctuary was provided in which he might take
refuge from the avenger of blood.
The idea of justice thus underwent a gradual sublimation from punishment
and reward according to acts, to punishment and reward according to
desert; or, in other words, according to motive. Righteousness, that is,
action from right motive, not only became synonymous with justice, but the
positive constituent of innocence and the very heart of goodness.
CCXLIV
Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts which are grouped under
the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his
parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly, the sum of
tendencies to act in a certain, way, which we call "character," is often
to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we
may justly say that this "character"—this moral and intellectual
essence of a man—does veritably pass over from one fleshy tabernacle
to another, ana does really transmigrate from generation to generation. In
the new-born infant the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is
little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become
actualities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dulness or
brightness, weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with
each feature modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing
else, the character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies.
CCXLV
Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the remarkable theory of
which I have endeavoured to give a reasoned outline. It was folly to
continue to exist when an overplus of pain was certain; and the
probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with the prolongation of
existence, were so overwhelming. Slaying the body only made matters worse;
there was nothing for it but to slay the soul by the voluntary arrest of
all its activities. Property, social ties, family affections, common
companionship, must be abandoned; the most natural appetites, even that
for food, must be suppressed, or at least minimized; until all that
remained of a man was the impassive, extenuated, mendicant monk,
self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances, which the deluded mystic took for
foretastes of the final union with Brahma.
CCXLVI
If the cosmos is the effect of an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely
beneficent cause, the existence in it of real evil, still less of
necessarily inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. Yet the universal
experience of mankind testified then, as now, that, whether we look within
us or without us, evil stares us in the face on all sides; that if
anything is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities.
It would be a new thing in history if a priori philosophers were
daunted by the factious opposition of experience; and the Stoics were the
last men to allow themselves to be beaten by mere facts.﹃Give me a
doctrine and I will find the reasons for it,﹄said Chrysippus. So they
perfected, if they did not invent, that ingenious and plausible form of
pleading, the Theodicy; for the purpose of showing firstly, that there is
no such thing as evil; secondly, that if there is, it is the necessary
correlate of good; and, moreover, that it is either due to our own fault,
or inflicted for our benefit.
CCXLVII
Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to evil.
Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and
happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily
effaced.
CCXLVIII
In the language of the Stoa, "Nature" was a word of many meanings. There
was the "Nature" of the cosmos, and the "Nature" of man. In the latter,
the animal "nature," which man shares with a moiety of the living part of
the cosmos, was distinguished from a higher "nature." Even in this higher
nature there were grades of rank. The logical faculty is an instrument
which may be turned to account for any purpose. The passions and the
emotions are so closely tied to tne lower nature that they may be
considered to be pathological, rather than normal, phenomena. The one
supreme, hegemonic, faculty, which constitutes the essential "nature" of
man, is most nearly represented by that which, in the language of a later
philosophy, has been called the pure reason. It is this "nature" which
holds up the ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute submission of
the will to its behests. It is this which commands all men to love one
another, to return good for evil, to regard one another as fellow-citizens
of one great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress towards perfection of
a civilised state, or polity, depends on the obedience of its members to
these commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure reason the
"political" nature. Unfortunately, the sense of the adjective has
undergone so much modification that the application of it to that which
commands the sacrifice of self to the common good would now sound almost
grotesque.
CCXLIX
The majority of us, I apprehend, profess neither pessimism nor optimism.
We hold that the world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably
might be; and, as most of us have reason, now and again, to discover that
it can be. Those who have failed to experience the joys that make life
worth living are, probably, in as small a minority as those who have never
known the griefs that rob existence of its savour and turn its richest
fruits into mere dust and ashes.
CCL
There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called
"ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole,
animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of
the struggle for existence and the consequent "survival of the fittest";
therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same
process to help them towards perfection. I suspect that this fallacy has
arisen out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase﹃survival of the
fittest.﹄"Fittest" has a connotation of "best"; and about "best" there
hangs a moral flavour. In cosmic nature, however, what is "fittest"
depends upon the conditions. Long since, I ventured to point out that if
our hemisphere were to cool again, the survival of the fittest might bring
about, in the vegetable kingdom, a population of more and more stunted and
humbler and humbler organisms, until the "fittest" that survived might be
nothing but lichens, diatoms, and such microscopic organisms as those
which give red snow its colour; while, if it became hotter, the pleasant
valleys of the Thames and Isis might be uninhabitable by any animated
beings save those that flourish in a tropical jungle. They, as the
fittest, the best adapted to the changed conditions, would survive.
CCLI
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 place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint;
in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it
requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his
fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the
fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It
repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man
who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be
mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it: and
shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been
permitted to live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of
curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the
community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if not
existence itself, at least the life of something better than a brutal
savage.
CCLII
The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for
millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time,
the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The
most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the
power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the
great year.
Moreover, the cosmic nature born with us and, to a large extent, necessary
for our maintenance, is the outcome of millions of years of severe
training, and it would be folly to imagine that a few centuries will
suffice to subdue its masterfulness to purely ethical ends. Ethical nature
may count upon having to reckon with a tenacious and powerful enemy as
long as the world lasts. But, on the other hand, I see no limit to the
extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of
investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions
of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by history. And
much may be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence
which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of
the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts
of savagery in civilized men.
But if we may permit ourselves a larger hope of abatement of the essential
evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact
knowledge, faced the problem of existence more than a score of centuries
ago, I deem it an essential condition of the realization of that hope that
we should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is
the proper object of life.
CCLIII
We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when
good and evil could be met with the same "frolic welcome"; the attempts to
escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from the
battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful over-confidence
and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage. We are grown men, and
must play the man
strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,
cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in and
around us, with stout hearts set on diminishing it. So far, we all may
strive in one faith towards one hope:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
.... but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done.
CCLIV
I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my
life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by
art Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our
posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of
the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture
will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world;
and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I
do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the
aesthetic province, as in that of tine intellect, I am afraid he is
nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves
where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never
been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple
devoted to the earthgods, of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Yet I
doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits
meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad
Socratic face of his which is utterly﹃beyond the bounds of physical
science.﹄Physical science may know all about his clutching the fruit and
munching it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation of his
palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his
brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which, for a
moment, hang out their signal lights in his melancholy eyes, are as
utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the "fine frenzy" of a human
rhapsodist.
CCIV
When I was a mere boy, with a perverse tendency to think when I ought to
have been playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this formidable
problem, What would become of things if they lost their qualities? As the
qualities had no objective existence, and the thing without qualities was
nothing, the solid world seemed whittled away—to my great horror. As
I grew older, and learned to use the terms "matter" and "force," the
boyish problem was revived, mutato nomine. On the one hand, the
notion of matter without force seemed to resolve the world into a set of
geometrical ghosts, too dead even to jabber. On the other hand,
Boscovich's hypothesis, by which matter was resolved into centres of
force, was very attractive. But when one tried to think it out, what in
the world became of force considered as an objective entity? Force, even
the most materialistic of philosophers will agree with the most
idealistic, is nothing but a name for the cause of motion. And if, with
Boscovich, I resolved things into centres of force, then matter vanished
altogether and left immaterial entities in its place. One might as well
frankly accept Idealism and have done with it.
CCLVI
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in
the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabeled.
The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not
under proper control. I could find no label that would suit me, so, in my
desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one; and, as the
chief thing I was sure of was that I did not know a great many things that
the -ists and the -ites about me professed to be familiar with, I called
myself an Agnostic. Surely no denomination could be more modest or more
appropriate; and I cannot imagine why I should be every now and then haled
out of my refuge and declared sometimes to be a Materialist, sometimes an
Atheist, sometimes a Positivist, and sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly
or reactionary Obscurantist.
CCLVII
Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the freedom of the will. In the
only sense in which the word freedom is intelligible to me—that is
to say, the absence of any restraint upon doing what one likes within
certain limits—physical science certainly gives no more ground for
doubting it than the common sense of mankind does. And if physical
science, in strengthening our belief in the universality of causation and
abolishing chance as an absurdity, leads to the conclusion of determinism,
it does no more than follow the track of consistent and logical thinkers
in philosophy and in theology, before it existed or was thought of.
Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of
philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of
that which is improperly called the freewill doctrine is that
occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say,
not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself—which
is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine.
CCLVIII
If the diseases of society consist in the weakness of its faith in the
existence of the God of the theologians, in a future state, and in
uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress
Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know
nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil
scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.
Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters.
She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is
rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and
material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken
of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of
evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant
goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in
her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to
have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe
that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this
or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but
in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends
social disorganisation upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends
physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively
faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
CCLIX
The first act of a new-born child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it
will never draw a deeper, inasmuch as the passages and chambers of the
lungs, once distended with air, do not empty themselves again; it is only
a fraction of their contents which passes in and out with the flow and the
ebb of the respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of drawing breath, or
inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which the handles of a
bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like
manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which we call exertion, or
work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is
destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration which began with his
first breath ends only with his last; nor does one born in the purple get
off with a lighter task than the child who first sees light under a hedge.
How is it that the new-born infant is enabled to perform this first
instalment of the sentence of lifelong labour which no man may escape?
Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular question, it
is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of materials supplied by
its mother; and in the course of such building-up, provided with a set of
motors—the muscles. Each of these muscles contains a stock of
substance capable of yielding energy under certain conditions, one of
which is a change of state in the nerve-fibres connected with it The
powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of
yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of
the lock, which intervenes between the finger of the man who pulls the
trigger and the cartridge. If that change is brought about, the potential
energy of the powder passes suddenly into actual energy, and does the work
of propelling the bullet The powder, therefore, may be appropriately
called work-stuff not only because it is stuff which is easily made to
yield work in the physical sense, but because a good deal of work in the
economical sense has contributed to its production. Labour was necessary
to collect, transport, and purify the raw sulphur and saltpetre; to cut
wood and convert it into powdered charcoal; to mix these ingredients in
the right proportions; to give the mixture the proper grain, and so on.
The powder once formed part of the stock, or capital, of a powder-maker:
and it is not only certain natural bodies which are collected and stored
in the gunpowder, but the labour bestowed on the operations mentioned may
be figuratively said to be incorporated in it.
CCLX
In principle, the work-stuff stored in the muscles of the new-born child
is comparable to that stored in the gun-barrel. The infant is launched
into altogether new surroundings; and these operate through the mechanism
of the nervous machinery, with the result that the potential energy of
some of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring about inspiration is
suddenly converted into actual energy; and this, operating through the
mechanism of the respiratory apparatus, gives rise to an act of
inspiration. As the bullet is propelled by the "going off" of the powder,
as it might be said that the ribs are raised and the midriff depressed by
the "going off" of certain portions of muscular work-stuff. This
work-stuff is part of a stock or capital of that commodity stored up in
the child s organism before birth, at the expense of the mother; and the
mother has made good her expenditure by drawing upon the capital of
food-stuffs which furnished her daily maintenance.
Under these circumstances, it does not appear to me to be open to doubt
that the primary act of outward labour in the series which necessarily
accompany the life of man is dependent upon the pre-existence of a stock
of material which is not only of use to him, but which is disposed in such
a manner as to be utilisable with facility. And I further imagine that the
propriety of the application of the term "capital" to this stock of useful
substance cannot be justly called in question; inasmuch as it is easy to
prove that the essential constituents of the work-stuff accumulated in the
child's muscles have merely been transferred from the store of
food-stuffs, which everybody admits to be capital, by means of the
maternal organism to that of the child, in which they are again deposited
to await use. Every subsequent act of labour, in like manner, involves an
equivalent consumption of the child's store of work-stuff—its vital
capital; and one of the main objects of the process of breathing is to get
rid of some of the effects of that consumption. It follows, then, that,
even if no other than the respiratory work were going on in the organism,
the capital of work-stuff, which the child brought with it into the world,
must sooner or later be used up, and the movements of breathing must come
to an end; just as the see-saw of the piston of a steam-engine stops when
the coal in the fireplace has burnt away. Milk, however, is a stock of
materials which essentially consists of savings from the food-stuffs
supplied to the mother. And these savings are in such a physical and
chemical condition that the organism of the child can easily convert them
into work-stuff. That is to say, by borrowing directly from the vital
capital of the mother, indirectly from the store in the natural bodies
accessible to her; it can make good the loss of its own. The operation of
borrowing, however, involves further work; that is, the labour of sucking,
which is a mechanical operation of much the same nature as breathing. The
child thus pays for the capital it borrows m labour; but as the value in
work-stuff of the milk obtained is very far greater than the value of that
labour, estimated by the consumption of work-stuff it involves, the
operation yields a large profit to the infant. The overplus of food-stuff
suffices to increase the child's capital of work-stuff; and to supply not
only the materials for the enlargement of the "buildings and machinery"
which is expressed by the child's growth, but also the energy required to
put all these materials together, and to carry them to their proper
places. Thus, throughout the years of infancy, and so long thereafter as
the youth or man is not thrown upon his own resources, he lives by
consuming the vital capital provided by others.
CCLXI
Let us now suppose the child come to man's estate in the condition of a
wandering savage, dependent for his food upon what he can pick up or
catch, after the fashion of the Australian aborigines. It is plain that
the place of mother, as the supplier of vital capital, is now taken by the
fruits, seeds, and roots of plants and by various kinds of animals....
The savage, like the child, borrows the capital he needs, and, at any
rate, intentionally, does nothing towards repayment; it would plainly be
an improper use of the word "produce" to say that his labour in hunting
for the roots, or the fruits, or the eggs, or the grubs and snakes, which
he finds and eats, "produces" or contributes to "produce" them. The same
thing is true of more advanced tribes, who are still merely hunters, such
as the Esquimaux. They may expend more labour and skill; but it is spent
in destruction.
CCLXII
When we find set forth as an "absolute" truth the statement that the
essential factors in economic production are land, capital and labour—when
this is offered as an axiom whence all sorts of other important truths may
be deduced—it is needful to remember that the assertion is true only
with a qualification. Undoubtedly "vital capital" is essential; for, as we
have seen, no human work can be done unless it exists, not even that
internal work of the body which is necessary to passive life. But, with
respect to labour (that is, human labour) I hope to have left no doubt on
the reader's mind that, m regard to production, the importance of human
labour may be so small as to be almost a vanishing quantity.
CCLXIII
The one thing needful for economic production is the green plant, as the
sole producer of vital capital from natural inorganic bodies. Men might
exist without labour (in the ordinary sense) and without land; without
plants they must inevitably perish.
CCLXIV
Since no amount of labour can produce an ounce of food-stuff beyond the
maximum producible by a limited number of plants, under the most
favourable circumstances in regard to those conditions which are not
affected by labour, it follows that, if the number of men to be fed
increases indefinitely, a time must come when some will have to starve.
That is the essence of the so-called Malthusian doctrine; and it is a
truth which, to my mind, is as plain as the general proposition that a
quantity which constantly increases will, some time or other, exceed any
greater quantity the amount of which is fixed.
CCLXV
"Virtually" is apt to cover more intellectual sins than "charity" does
moral delicts.
CCLXVI
The notion that the value of a thing bears any necessary relation to the
amount of labour (average or otherwise) bestowed upon it, is a fallacy
which needs no further refutation than it has already received. The
average amount of labour bestowed upon warming-pans confers no value upon
them in the eyes of a Gold-Coast negro; nor would an Esquimaux give a
slice of blubber for the most elaborate of ice-machines.
CCLXVII
Who has ever imagined that wealth which, in the hands of an employer, is
capital, ceases to be capital if it is in the hands of a labourer? Suppose
a workman to be paid thirty shillings on Saturday evening for six days'
labour, that thirty shillings comes out of the employer's capital, and
receives the name of "wages" simply because it is exchanged for labour. In
the workman's pocket, as he goes home, it is a part of his capital, in
exactly the same sense as, half an hour before, it was part of the
employer's capital; he is a capitalist just as much as if he were a
Rothschild.
CCLXVIII
I think it may be not too much to say that, of all the political delusions
which are current in this queer world, the very stupidest are those which
assume that labour and capital are necessarily antagonistic; that all
capital is produced by labour and therefore, by natural right, is the
property of the labourer; that the possessor of capital is a robber who
preys on the workman and appropriates to himself that which he has had no
share in producing.
On the contrary, capital and labour are necessarily, close allies; capital
is never a product of human labour alone; it exists apart from human
labour; it is the necessary antecedent of labour; and it furnishes the
materials on which labour is employed. The only indispensable form of
capital—vital capital—cannot be produced by human labour. All
that man can do is to favour its formation by the real producers. There is
no intrinsic relation between the amount of labour bestowed on an article
and its value in exchange. The claim of labour to the total result of
operations which are rendered possible only by capital is simply an a
priori iniquity.
CCLXIX
The vast and varied procession of events, which we call Nature, affords a
sublime spectacle and an inexhaustible wealth of attractive problems to
the speculative observer. If we confine our attention to that aspect which
engages the attention of the intellect, nature appears a beautiful and
harmonious whole, the incarnation of a faultless logical process, from
certain premisses in the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future.
But if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more human, point of
view; if our moral sympathies are allowed to influence our judgment, and
we permit ourselves to criticize our great mother as we criticize one
another; then our verdict, at least so far as sentient nature is
concerned, can hardly be so favourable.
In sober truth, to those who have made a study of the phenomena of life as
they are exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, the optimistic
dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds, will seem little
better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only another instance
to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a priori
speculators who, having created God in their own image, find no difficulty
in assuming that the Almighty must have been actuated by the same motives
as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any other course been
practicable, He would no more have made infinite suffering a necessary
ingredient of His handiwork than a respectable philosopher would have done
the like.
But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured thesis of
physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated by
principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial
confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true that
sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances directed
towards the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and it may be
proper to say that these are evidences of benevolence. But if so, why is
it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no
less necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are
evidences of malevolence?
If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human workmanship, we should
call skill, is visible in those parts of the organization of a deer to
which it owes its ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at least
equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of the wolf which enables
him to track, and sooner or later to bring down, the deer. Viewed under
the dry light of science, deer and wolf are alike admirable; and, if both
were non-sentient automata, there would be nothing to qualify our
admiration of the action of the one on the other. But the fact that the
deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts suffering, engages our moral
sympathies. We should call men like the deer innocent and good, men such
as the wolf malignant and bad; we should call those who defended the deer
and aided him to escape brave and compassionate, and those who helped the
wolf in his bloody work base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer these
judgments to nature outside the world of man at all, we must do so
impartially. In that case, the goodness of the right hand which helps the
deer, and wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will
neutralize one another: and the course of nature will appear to be neither
moral nor immoral, but non-moral.
This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous facts in every part of the
sentient world; yet, mas-much as it not only jars upon prevalent
prejudices, but arouses the natural dislike to that which is painful, much
ingenuity has been exercised in devising an escape from it.
CCLXX
From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the
same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated,
and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the
cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn
his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill and
training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut his eyes if he would
not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both
vanquished and victor. And since the great game is going on in every
corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears
sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear—
....sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle
—it seems to follow that, if this world is governed by benevolence,
it must be a different sort of benevolence from that of John Howard.
CCLXXI
This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the
worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing
good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the
moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but
there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind
could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less
happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine
people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of
neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every
twenty-four—a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know,
to their cost, is not extravagant—the burden of life would have been
immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general
course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under
worse conditions than these.
CCLXXII
There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which renders the hypothesis
that the course of sentient nature is dictated by malevolence quite
untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and
the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all appearance
unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the
bargain of life. To those who experience them, few delights can be more
entrancing than such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts,
and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in,
evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable
degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.
CCLXXIII
The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Ormuzd has not had
his way in this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little
consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism. If we desire
to represent the course of nature in terms of human thought, and assume
that it was intended to be that which it is, we must say that its
governing principle is intellectual and not moral; that it is a
materialized logical process, accompanied by pleasures and pains, the
incidence of which, in the majority of cases, has not the slightest
reference to moral desert That the rain falls alike upon the just and the
unjust, and that those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were no worse
than their neighbours, seem to be Oriental modes of expressing the same
conclusion.
CCLXXIV
In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes the sum of the
phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and
society, like art, is therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to
distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays the part of immediate
cause, as something apart; and therefore, society, like art, is usefully
to be considered as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable, and
even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from
nature in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the
course shaped by the ethical man—the member of society or citizen—necessarily
runs counter to that which tne non-ethical man—the primitive savage,
or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom—tends to adopt. The
latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any
other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of
setting limits to the struggle.
CCLXXV
The first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual
war, whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step, created
society. But, in establishing peace, they obviously put a limit upon the
struggle for existence. Between the members of that society, at any rate,
it was not to be pursued à outrance. And of all the
successive shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches
perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most
strictly limited. The primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated
whatever took his fancy, and killed whosoever opposed him, if he could. On
the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of
action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of
others; he seeks the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an
essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and means with him;
and he founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which is
the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to escape
from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of
the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man,
governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a
moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality.
CCLXXVI
I was once talking with a very eminent physician* about the vis medicatrix
naturæ. "Stuff!" said he; "nine times out of ten nature does not
want to cure the man: she wants to put him in his coffin."
* The late Sir W. Gull.
CCLXXVII
Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and industry have had their
way among us with less interruption and under more favourable conditions
than in any other country on the face of the earth. The wealth of Croesus
was nothing to that which we have accumulated, and our prosperity has
filled the world with envy. But Nemesis did not forget Croesus: has she
forgotten us?
CCLXXVIII
Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than the
position in which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree
we have attained the condition of peace which is the main object of social
organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be assumed that we desire
nothing but that which is in itself innocent and praiseworthy—namely,
the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of
ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for
existence with our presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning
neighbours. We seek peace and we do not ensue it. The moral nature in us
asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral
nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish family motto,﹃Thou
shalt starve ere I want.﹄Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as
unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever
been devised, or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the
distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be
destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of
that struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of
society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition
of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting
may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in
contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state of
things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her
way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which
does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself
has generated.
CCLXXIX
It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling towards those neighbours
and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but if somebody is to
be starved, the modern world has no Oracle of Delphi to which the nations
can appeal for an indication of the victim. It is open to us to try our
fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate, there will be a certain ground
for believing: that we are the right people to escape. Securus judical
orbis.
To this end, it is well to look into the necessary conditions of our
salvation by works. They are two, one plain to all the world and hardly
needing insistence; the other seemingly not so plain, since too often it
has been theoretically and practically left out of sight The obvious
condition is that our produce snail be better than that of others. There
is only one reason why our goods should be referred to those of our rivals—our
customers must find them better at the price. That means that we must use
more knowledge, skill, and industry in producing them, without a
proportionate increase in the cost of production; and, as the price of
labour constitutes a large element in that cost, the rate of wages must be
restricted within certain limits. It is perfectly true that cheap
production and cheap labour are by no means synonymous; but it is also
true that wages cannot increase beyond a certain proportion without
destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as part and parcel of
cheapness, a moderate price of labour, is essential to our success as
competitors in the markets of the world.
The second condition is really quite as plainly indispensable as the
first, if one thinks seriously about the matter. It is social stability.
Society-is stable when the wants of its members obtain as much
satisfaction as, life being what it is, common sense and experience show
may be reasonably expected. Mankind, in general, care very little for
forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort; and nothing
really stirs the great multitude to break with custom and incur the
manifest perils of revolt except the belief that misery in this world, or
damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the continuance of the
state of things in which they have been brought up. But when they do
attain that conviction, society becomes as unstable as a package of
dynamite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion which sends
it back to the chaos of savagery.
CCLXXX
Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly conditions of success;
but of what avail are they likely to be unless they are backed up by
honesty, energy, goodwill, and all the physical and moral faculties that
go to the making of manhood, and unless they are stimulated by hope of
such reward as men may fairly look to? And what dweller in the slough of
want, dwarfed in body and soul, demoralized, hopeless, can reasonably be
expected to possess these qualities?
CCLXXXI
I am as strongly convinced as the most pronounced individualist can be,
that it is desirable that every man should be free to act in every way
which does not limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow-man. But I
fail to connect that great induction of political science with the
practical corollary which is frequently drawn from it: that the State—that
is, the people in their corporate capacity—has no business to meddle
with anything but the administration of justice and external defence. It
appears to me that the amount of freedom which incorporate society may
fitly leave to its members is not a fixed quantity, to be determined a
priori by deduction from the fiction called "natural rights"; but that
it must be determined by, and vary with, circumstances. I conceive it to
be demonstrable that the higher and the more complex the organization of
the social body, the more closely is the life of each member bound up with
that of the whole; and the larger becomes the category of acts which cease
to be merely self-regarding, and which interfere with the freedom of
others more or less seriously.
If a squatter, living ten miles away from any neighbour, chooses to burn
his house down to get rid of vermin, there may be no necessity (in the
absence of insurance offices) that the law should interfere with his
freedom of action; his act can hurt nobody but himself. But if the dweller
in a street chooses to do the same thing, the State very properly makes
such a proceeding a crime, and punishes it as such. He does meddle with
his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it might, perhaps, be a
tenable doctrine, that it would be needless, and even tyrannous, to make
education compulsory in a sparse agricultural population, living in
abundance on the produce of its own soil; but, in a densely populated
manufacturing country, struggling for existence with competitors, every
ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer
of the liberty of, his fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under
such circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax, levied for
purposes of defence.
CCLXXXII
That State action always has been more or less misdirected, and always
will be so, is, I believe, perfectly true. But I am not aware that it is
more true of the action of men in their corporate capacity than it is of
the doings of individuals. The wisest and most dispassionate man in
existence, merely wishing to go from one stile in a field to the opposite,
will not walk quite straight—he is always going a little wrong, and
always correcting himself; and I can only congratulate the individualist
who is able to say that his general course of life has been of a less
undulatory character. To abolish State action, because its direction is
never more than approximately correct, appears to me to be much the same
thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether, because, do what he
will, the ship yaws more or less.﹃Why should I be robbed of my property
to pay for teaching another man's children?﹄is an individualist question,
which is not unfrequently put as if it settles the whole business. Perhaps
it does, but I find difficulties in seeing why it should. The parish in
which I live makes me pay my share for the paving and lighting of a great
many streets that I never pass through; and I might plead that I am robbed
to smooth the way and lighten the darkness of other people. But I am
afraid the parochial authorities would not let me off on this plea; and I
must confess I do not see why they should.
CCLXXXIII
I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have every reason to believe
that I came into this world a small reddish person, certainly without a
gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or
concrete "rights" or property of any description. If a foot was not set
upon me at once, as a squalling nuisance, it was either the natural
affection of those about me, which I certainly had done nothing to
deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully
built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that
catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the
vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to
deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it strikes me
that, though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for my day's work,
and may justly call them my property—yet, without that organization
of society, created out of the toil and blood of long generations before
my time, I should probably have had nothing but a flint axe and an
indifferent hut to call my own; and even those would be mine only so long
as no stranger savage came my way.
So that if society, having, quite gratuitously, done all these things for
me, asks me in turn to do something towards its preservation—even if
that something is to contribute to the teaching of other men's children—I
really, in spite of all my individualist learnings, feel rather ashamed to
say no. And, if I were not ashamed, I cannot say that I think that society
would be dealing unjustly with me in converting the moral obligation into
a legal one. There is a manifest unfairness in letting all the burden be
borne by the willing horse.
CCLXXXIV
It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact that efficient
teachers of science and of technology are not to be made by the processes
in vogue at ordinary training colleges. The memory loaded with mere
bookwork is not the thing wanted—is, in fact, rather worse than
useless—in the teacher of scientific subjects. It is absolutely
essential that his mind should be full of knowledge and not of mere
learning, and that what he knows should have been learned in the
laboratory rather than in the library.
CCLXXXV
The attempt to form a just conception of the value of work done in any
department of human knowledge, and of its significance as an indication of
the intellectual and moral qualities of which it was the product, is an
undertaking which must always be beset with difficulties, and may easily
end in making the limitations of the appraiser more obvious than the true
worth of that which he appraises. For the judgment of a contemporary is
liable to be obscured by intellectual incompatibilities and warped by
personal antagonisms; while the critic of a later generation, though he
may escape the influence of these sources of error, is often ignorant, or
forgetful, of the conditions under which the labours of his predecessors
have been carried on. He is prone to lose sight of the fact that without
their clearing of the ground and rough-hewing of the foundation-stones,
the stately edifice of later builders could not have been erected.
CCLXXXVI
The vulgar antithesis of fact and theory is founded on a misconception of
the nature of scientific theory, which is, or ought to be, no more than
the expression of fact in a general form. Whatever goes beyond such
expression is hypothesis; and hypotheses are not ends, but means. They
should be regarded as instruments by which new lines of inquiry are
indicated; or by the aid of which a provisional coherency and
intelligibility may be given to seemingly disconnected groups of
phenomena. The most useful of servants to the man of science, they are the
worst of masters. And when the establishment of the hypothesis becomes the
end, and fact is alluded to only so far as it suits the "Idee," science
has no longer anything to do with the business.
CCLXXXVII
Scientific observation tell us that living birds form a group or class of
animals, through which a certain form of skeleton runs; and that this kind
of skeleton differs in certain well-defined characters from that of
mammals. On the other hand, if anyone utterly ignorant of osteology, but
endowed with the artistic sense of form, were set before a bird skeleton
and a mammalian skeleton, he would at once see that the two were similar
and yet different. Very likely he would be unable to give clear expression
to his just sense of the differences and resemblances; perhaps he would
make great mistakes in detail if he tried. Nevertheless, he would be able
to draw from memory a couple of sketches, in which all the salient points
of likeness and unlikeness would be reproduced with sufficient accuracy.
The mere osteologist, however accurately he might put the resemblances and
differences into words, if he lacked the artistic visualising faculty,
might be hopelessly incompetent to perform any such feat; lost in details,
it might not even occur to him that it was possible; or, still more
probably, the habit of looking for differences might impair the perception
of resemblances.
Under these circumstances, the artist might be led to higher and broader
views, and thus be more useful to the progress of science than the
osteological expert. Not that the former attains the higher truth by a
different method; for the way of reaching truth is one and indivisible.
Whether he knows it or not, the artist has made a generalization from two
sets of facts, which is perfectly scientific in form; and trustworthy so
far as it rests upon the direct perception of similarities and
dissimilarities. The only peculiarity of the artistic application of
scientific method lies in the artist's power of visualizing the result of
his mental processes, of embodying the facts of resemblance in a visible
"type," and of showing the manner in which the differences may be
represented as modifications of that type; he does, in fact,
instinctively, what an architect, who desires to demonstrate the community
of plan in certain ancient temples, does by the methodical construction of
plans, sections, and elevations; the comparison of which will furnish him
with the "type" of such temples.
Thus, what I may term the artistic fashion of dealing with anatomy is not
only perfectly legitimate, but has been of great utility. The harm of it
does not begin until tine attempt is made to get more out of this visual
projection of thought than it contains; until the origin of the notion of
"type" is forgotten and the speculative philosopher deludes himself with
the supposition that the generalization suggested by fact is an "Idea" of
the Pure Reason, with which fact must, somehow or other, be made to agree.
CCLXXXVIII
Flowers are the primers of the morphologist; those who run may read in
them uniformity of type amidst endless diversity, singleness of plan with
complex multiplicity of detail. As a musician might say, every natural
group of flowering plants is a sort of visible fugue, wandering about a
central theme which is never forsaken, however it may, momentarily, cease
to be apparent.
CCLXXXIX
Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the
qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the
habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet was no
mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy, geology,
botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would have
sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those days, if
only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else. Unfortunately for
Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, consequently, for
the attention attracted by his work, he did not come forward as a man of
science until the public had ranged him among the men of literature. And
when the little men have thus classified a big man, they consider that the
last word has been said about him; it appears to the thought hardly decent
on his part if he venture to stray beyond the speciality they have
assigned to him. It does not seem to occur to them that a clear intellect
is an engine capable of supplying power to all sorts of mental factories;
nor to admit that, as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may
have a right to live for himself as well as for the public; to follow the
line of work that happens to interest him, rather than that which
interests them.
On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had
less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of
dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate,
there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an
infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify
the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas
were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give these
airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague suppositions
into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was just this service
which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the intermaxillary bone, on
osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of plants.
CCXC
All this is mere justice to Goethe; but, as it is the unpleasant duty of
the historian to do justice upon, as well as to, great men, it behoves me
to add that the germs of the worst faults of later ioeculative
morphologists are no less visible in his writings than their great merits.
In the artist-philosopher there was, at best, a good deal more artist than
philosopher; and when Goethe ventured into the regions which belong to
pure science, this excess of a virtue had all the consequences of a vice.
"Trennen und zahlen lag nicht in meiner Natur," says he; but the mental
operations of which "analysis and numeration" are partial expressions are
indispensable for every step of progress beyond happy glimpses, even in
morphology; while, in physiology and in physics, failure in the most exact
performance of these operations involves sheer disaster, as indeed Goethe
was afforded abundant opportunity of learning. Yet he never understood the
sharp lessons he received, and put down to malice, or prejudice, the
ill-reception of his unfortunate attempts to deal with purely physical
problems.
CCXCI
There was never any lack of the scientific imagination about the great
anatomist; and the charge of indifference to general ideas, sometimes
brought against him, is stupidly unjust. But Cuvier was one of those
happily endowed persons in whom genius never parts company with
common-sense; and whose perception of the importance of sound method is so
great that they look at even a truth, hit upon by those who pursue an
essentially vicious method, with the sort of feeling with which an honest
trader regards the winnings of a gambler. They hold it better to remain
poor than obtain riches by the road that, as a rule, leads to ruin.
CCXCII
The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in science. Here we see
the men, over whose minds the coming events of the world of biology cast
their shadows, doing their best to spoil their case in stating it; while
the man who represented sound scientific method is doing his best to stay
the inevitable progress of thought and bolster up antiquated traditions.
The progress of knowledge during the last seventy years enables us to see
that neither Geoffroy, nor Cuvier, was altogether right nor altogether
wrong; and that they were meant to hunt m couples instead of pulling
against one another. Science has need of servants of very different
qualifications; of artistic constructors no less than of men of business;
of people to design her palaces and of others to see that the materials
are sound and well-fitted together; of some to spur investigators, and of
others to keep their heads cool. The only would-be servants, who are
entirely unprofitable, are those who do not take the trouble to
interrogate Nature, but imagine vain things about her; and spin, from
their inner consciousness, webs, as exquisitely symmetrical as those of
the most geometrical of spiders, but alas! as easily torn to pieces by
some inconsidered bluebottle of a fact.
CCXCIII
There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or
wrecks one's self on.
CCXCIV
A Local Museum should be exactly what its name implies, viz., "Local"—illustrating
local Geology, local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archaeology.
Such a museum, if residents who are interested in these sciences take
proper pains, may be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique
of its kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they
want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance.
Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols,
sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—who shall
describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing,
because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere
than under their noses. What they want to know is that their﹃America is
here,﹄as Wilhelm Meister has it.
CCXCV
A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that
which he believes, will always enlist the good-will and the respect,
however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.
CCXCVI
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
CCXCVII
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for
believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.
I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to
deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori
difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing
anything else, and I will believe that Why should I not? It is not half so
wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of
matter. <
Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone
can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its
marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that
the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel,﹃I believe such
and such to be true.﹄All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest
penalties of existence cling about that act The universe is one and the
same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some
little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously
refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I
cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to
me on other terms.
CCXCVIII
I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of
my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as
Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatize a word, and it alters
nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a
manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I
was before.
CCXCIX
I do not know whether the animals persist after they disappear or not. I
do not even know whether the infinite difference between us and them may
not be compensated by their persistence and mycessation
after apparent death, just as the humble bulb of an annual fives, whilst
the glorious flowers it has put forth die away.
CCC
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not
to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
CCCI
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great
truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to
the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to
give up every preconceived notion, follow numbly wherever and to whatever
abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to
learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do
this.
CCCII
There are, however, other arguments commonly brought forward in favour of
the immortality of man, which are to my mind not only delusive but
mischievous. The one is the notion that the moral government of the world
is imperfect without a system of future rewards and punishments. The other
is: that such a system is indispensable to practical morality. I believe
that both these dogmas are very mischievous lies.
With respect to the first, I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief
that the Divine Government (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum
of the "customs of matter") is wholly just The more I know intimately of
the lives of other men (to say nothing of my own), the more obvious it is
to me that the wicked does not flourish nor is the righteous
punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all
forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the whole
Law—physical as well as moral—and that moral obedience will
not atone for physical sin, or vice versa.
CCCIII
The ledger of the Almighty is strictly kept, and every one of us has the
balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of
his existence.
Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding universe—that
conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In
short, as we live we are paid for living.
CCCIV
It is to be recollected in view of the apparent discrepancy between men's
acts and their rewards that Nature is juster than we. She takes into
account what a man brings with him into the world, which human justice
cannot do. If I, born a bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these
qualities from others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me,
but I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would be my
real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done the same thing.
CCCV
The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any
scientific fact The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of
the earth to the sun, and more so—for experimental proof of the fact
is within reach of us all—nay, is before us all in our own lives, if
we had but the eyes to see it.
CCCVI
Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that
the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this life leads men to a
ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and
punishments are here.
CCCVII
If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me from evil-doing, surely
a fortiori the certainty of hell now will do so? If a man could be
firmly impressed with the belief that stealing damaged him as much as
swallowing arsenic would do (and it does), would not the dissuasive force
of that belief be greater than that of any based on mere future
expectations?
CCCVIII
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind
bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part
of his duty, the words,﹃If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die.﹄I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked
me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his
alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in
human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to
face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from
whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through
all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that
cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality?
Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young the poor
brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a
gorge.
CCCIX
He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of
character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life
than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great
unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice
of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to
them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.
CCCX
Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to agree with the
statements as to the matters of fact laid down in Genesis—whether
the Gospels are historically true or not—are matters of
comparatively small moment in the face of the impassable gulf between the
anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless
impersonality of the unknown and unknowable which science shows everywhere
underlying the thin veil of phenomena.
CCCXI
I am too much a believer in Butler and in the great principle of the
"Analogy" that﹃there is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot
parallel it by a greater absurdity of Nature﹄(it is not commonly stated
in this way), to have any difficulties about miracles. I have never had
the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and
I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all
the atheistic and infidel school.
CCCXII
This universe is, I conceive, like to a great game being played out, and
we poor mortals are allowed to take a hand. By great good fortune the
wiser among us have made out some few of the rules of the game, as at
present played. We call them "Laws of Nature," and honour them because we
find that if we obey them we win something for our pains. The cards are
our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experimental verifications.
But what sane man would endeavour to solve this problem: given the rules
of a game and the winnings, to find whether the cards are made of
pasteboard or gold-leaf? Yet the problem of the metaphysicians is to my
mind no saner.
CCCXIII
I have not the smallest sentimental sympathy with the negro; don't believe
in him at all, in short. But it is clear to me that slavery means, for the
white man, bad political economy; bad social morality; bad internal
political organisation, and a bad influence upon free labour and freedom
all over the world.
CCCXIV
At the present time the important question for England is not the duration
of her coal, but the due comprehension of the truths of science, and the
labours of her scientific men.
CCCXV
It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
CCCXVI
A good book is comparable to a piece of meat, and fools are as flies who
swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing and hatching his own
particular maggot of an idea.
CCCXVII
Children work a greater metamorphosis in men than any other condition of
life. They ripen one wonderfully and make life ten times better worth
having than it was.
CCCXVIII
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality, Teach him what is
wise and beautiful, that is religion!
CCCXIX
People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want
is the moral teaching.
CCCXX
We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which
preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of
that movement But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the
bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free
thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to succumb after
a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues vast
political and social troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought will
win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that
this free thought will organize itself into a coherent system, embracing
human life and the world as one harmonious whole. But this organization
will be the work of generations of men, and those who further it most will
be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal
delusions.
CCCXXI
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is
ever done in this world by hesitation.
CCCXXII
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and
injustice by being damnably sentimental.
CCCXXIII
Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so
strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my
eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these
respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds
of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most
foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigour and
capacity.
CCCXXIV
We have heard a great deal lately about the physical disabilities of
women. Some of these alleged impediments, no doubt, are realty inherent in
their organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial—the
products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would tend so
effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness, and that
"over stimulation of the emotions" which, in plainer-spoken days, used to
be called wantonness, than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards
a definite object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play,
during the years of adolescence; and those who are best acquainted with
the acquirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest
to believe that the attempt to reach that standard is like to prove
exhausting to an ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.
CCCXXV
The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of
"Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide.
Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a
"medium" hired at a guinea a séance.
CCCXXVI
I ask myself—suppose you knew that by inflicting prolonged pain on
100 rabbits you could discover a way to the extirpation of leprosy, or
consumption, or locomotor ataxy, or of suicidal melancholia among human
beings, dare you refuse to inflict that pain? Now I am quite unable to say
that I dare. That sort of daring would seem to me to be extreme moral
cowardice, to involve gross inconsistency.
For the advantage and protection of society, we all agree to inflict pain
upon man—pain of the most prolonged and acute character—in our
prisons, and on our battlefields. If England were invaded, we should have
no hesitation about inflicting the maximum of suffering upon our invaders
for no other object than our own good.
But if the good of society and of a nation is a sufficient plea for
inflicting pain on men, I think it may suffice us for experimenting on
rabbits or dogs.
At the same time, I think that a heavy moral responsibility rests on those
who perform experiments of the second kind.
The wanton infliction of pain on man or beast is a crime; pity is that so
many of those who (as I think rightly) hold this view, seem to forget that
the criminality lies in the wantonness and not in the act of inflicting
pain per se.
CCCXXVII
The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and
intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give
these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever
station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be
and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the nation.
CCCXXVIII
As a matter of fact, men sin, and the consequences of their sins affect
endless generations of their progeny. Men are tempted, men are punished
for the sins of others without merit or demerit of their own; and they are
tormented for their evil deeds as long as their consciousness lasts.
CCCXXIX
I find that as a matter of experience, erroneous beliefs are punished, and
right beliefs are rewarded—though very often the erroneous belief is
based on a more conscientious study of the facts than right belief.
CCCXXX
If we are to assume that anybody has designedly set this wonderful
universe going, it is perfectly clear to me that he is no more entirely
benevolent and just in any intelligible sense of the words, than that he
is malevolent and unjust. Infinite benevolence need not have invented pain
and sorrow at all—infinite malevolence would very easily have
deprived us of the large measure of content and happiness that falls to
our lot After all, Butler's "Analogy" is unassailable, and there is
nothing in theological dogmas more contradictory to our moral sense, than
is to be found in the facts of nature. From which, however, the Bishop's
conclusion that the dogmas are true doesn't follow.
CCCXXXI
It appears to me that if every person who is engaged in an industry had
access to instruction in the scientific principles on which that industry
is based; in the mode of applying these principles to practice; in the
actual use of the means and appliances employed; in the language of the
people who know as much about the matter as we do ourselves; and lastly,
in the art of keeping accounts, Technical Education would have done all
that can be required of it.
CCCXXXII
Though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be worse.
CCCXXXIII
There are two things I really care about—one is the progress of
scientific thought, and the other is the bettering of the condition of the
masses of the people by bettering them in the way of lifting themselves
out of the misery which has hitherto been the lot of the majority of them.
Posthumous fame is not particularly attractive to me, but, if I am to be
remembered at all, I would rather it should be as﹃a man who did his best
to help the people﹄than by other title.
CCCXXXIV
I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse to us. But so long as we
make up our minds to hold it, we must also make up our minds to do those
things which are needful to hold it effectually, and in the long-run it
will be found that so doing is real justice both for ourselves, our
subject population, and the Afghans themselves.
CCCXXXV
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn
peace and self-respect.
CCCXXXVI
The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for
them. Only let us be sure that it is truth.
CCCXXXVII
Your astonishment at the tenacity of life of fallacies, permit me to say,
is shockingly unphysiological. They, like other low organisms, are
independent of brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are
smitten on the place where the brains ought to be.
CCCXXXVIII
I don't know what you think about anniversaries. I like them, being always
minded to drink my cup of life to the bottom, and take my chance of the
sweets and bitters.
CCCXXXIX
Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life—the
jamming common-sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.
CCCXL
Life is like walking along a crowded street—there always seem to be
fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement—and yet,
if one crosses over, matters are rarely mended.
CCCXLI
The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigour as long as
one lives, and death as soon as vigour flags.
CCCXLII
Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I apprehend, a question of
conditions. A whirlpool in a stream may remain in the same spot for any
imaginable time. Yet it is the effect of the motion of the particles of
the water in that spot which continually integrate themselves into the
whirlpool and disintegrate themselves from it The whirlpool is permanent
while the conditions last, though its constituents incessantly change.
Living bodies are just such whirlpools. Matter sets into them in the shape
of food,—sets out of them in the shape of waste products. Their
individuality lies in the constant maintenance of a characteristic form,
not in the preservation of material identity.
CCCXLIII
Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions
"Force," "Gravity," "Vitality," which our own brains have created. I do
not know anything about "inert" things in nature. If we reduce the world
to matter and motion, the matter is not "inert," inasmuch as the same
amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways. To
go back to my own illustration. The fabric of the watch is not inert,
every particle of it is in violent and rapid motion, and the winding-up
simply perturbs the whole infinitely complicated system in a particular
fashion. Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession of changes,
while a changing equilibrium is a contradiction m terms. I am not at all
clear that a living being is comparable to a machine running down. On this
side of the question the whirlpool affords a better parallel than the
watch. If you dam the stream above or below; the whirlpool dies; just as
the living being does if you cut off its food, or choke it with its own
waste products. And if you alter the sides or bottom of the stream you may
kill the whirlpool, just as you kill the animal by interfering with its
structure. Heat and oxidation as a source of heat appear to supply energy
to the living machine, the molecular structure of the germ furnishing the
"sides and bottom of the stream," that is, determining the results which
the energy supplied shall produce.
CCCXLIV
I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion
so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution—intelligible
to the young.
CCCXLV
Government by average opinion is merely a circuitous method of going to
the devil; those who profess to lead but in fact slavishly follow this
average opinion are simply the fastest runners and the loudest squeakers
of the herd which is rushing blindly down to its destruction.
CCCXLVI
It's very sad to lose your child just when he was beginning to bind
himself to you, and I don't know that it is much consolation to reflect
that the longer he had wound himself up in your heart-strings the worse
the tear would have been, which seems to have been inevitable sooner or
later. One does not weigh and measure these things while grief is fresh,
and in my experience a deep plunge into the waters of sorrow is the
hopefullest way of getting through them on to one's daily road of life
again. No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love
and sympathy count for something.
CCCXLVII
There is amazingly little evidence of﹃reverential care for unoffending
creation﹄in the arrangements of nature, that I can discover. If our ears
were sharp enough to hear all the cries of pain that are uttered in the
earth by men and beasts, we should be deafened by one continuous scream!
And yet the wealth of superfluous loveliness in the world condemns
pessimism. It is a hopeless riddle.
CCCXLVIII
A man who has only half as much food as he needs is indubitably starved,
even though his short rations consist of ortolans and are served upon gold
plate.
CCCXLIX
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
CCCL
We men of science, at any rate, hold ourselves morally bound to "try all
things and hold fast to that which is good"; and among public benefactors,
we reckon him who explodes old error, as next in rank to him who discovers
new truth.
CCCLI
Whatever Linnæus may say, man is not a rational animal—especially
in his parental capacity.
CCCLII
The inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history is just as
much a question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth or falsehood
of a matter of geology, and the value of evidence in the two cases must be
tested in the same way. If anyone tells me that the evidence of the
existence of man in the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I
frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but
that it is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of miocene
man.
Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we constantly, and
in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon extremely bad
evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in
consequence. And surely one must be something worse than a born fool to
pretend that such decision under the pressure of the enigmas of life ought
to have the smallest influence in those judgments which are made with due
and sufficient deliberation.
CCCLIII
1. The Church founded by Jesus has not made its way; has not
permeated the world—but did become extinct in the country of
its birth—as Nazarenism and Ebionism.
2. The Church that did make its way and coalesced with the State in the
4th century had no more to do with the Church founded by Jesus than
Ultra-montanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian Judaism and
Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as much of the old idolatry and demonology
as could be got in under new or old names.
3. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster to Christ with more truth
than he knew. Throughout the Empire the synagogues had their cloud of
Gentile hangers-on—those who "feared God"—and who were fully
prepared to accept a Christianity, which was merely an expurgated Judaism
and the belief in Jesus as the Messiah.
4. The Christian "Sodalitia" were not merely religious bodies, but
friendly societies, burial societies, and guilds. They hung together for
all purposes—the mob hated them as it now hates the Jews in Eastern
Europe, because they were more frugal, more industrious, and lived better
lives than their neighbours, while they stuck together like Scotchmen.
If these things are so—and I appeal to your knowledge of history
that they are so—what has the success of Christianity to do with the
truth or falsehood of the story of Jesus?
CCCLIV
It is Baur's great merit to have seen that the key to the problem of
Christianity lies in the Epistle to the Galatians. No doubt he and his
followers rather overdid the thing, but that is always the way with those
who take up a new idea.
CCCLV
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had
better turn to hand work—it is an indication on Nature's part that
she did not mean him to be a head worker.
CCCLVI
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our
beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
CCCLVII
Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition
of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the
merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express my opinion that, if there
is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of
the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the
winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its consequence, and
the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in
the extent and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical and
moral degradation, among the masses of the people, I should hail the
advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a
desirable consummation.
What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of
heaven to be his servant, and that the spirits of the earth and of the air
obey him, if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals
and keep him on the brink of destruction?
CCCLVIII
No induction, however broad its basis, can confer certainty—in the
strict sense of the word. The experience of the whole human race through
innumerable years has shown that stones unsupported fall to the ground,
but that does not make it certain that any day next week unsupported
stones will not move the other way. All that it does justify is the very
strong expectation, which hitherto has been invariably verified, that they
will do just the contrary.
Only one absolute certainty is possible to man—namely, that at any
given moment the feeling which he has exists.
All other so-called certainties are beliefs of greater or less intensity.
CCCLIX
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of
exclusively human manufacture—and very much to our credit.
CCCLX
There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human
affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection—except the
sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make
things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the
lesson I learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck
by me all my life.
You may make more of failing to get money, and of succeeding in getting
abuse—until such time in your life (if you are teachable) you have
ceased to care much about either.
CCCLXI
The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells neither one way nor the
other [on the doctrine of immortality]. Energy is the cause of movement of
body, i.e. things having mass. States of consciousness have no mass, even
if they can be conceded to be movable. Therefore even if they are caused
by molecular movements, they would not in any way affect the store of
energy.
Physical causation need not be the only kind of causation, and when
Cabanis said that thought was a function of the brain, in the same way as
bile secretion is a function of the liver, he blundered
philosophically. Bile is a product of the transformation of material
energy. But in the mathematical sense of the word "function" thought may
be a function of the brain. That is to say, it may arise only when certain
physical particles take on a certain order.
By way of a coarse analogy, consider a parallel-sided piece of glass
through which light passes. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be a
bi-convex, and a picture appears in its focus.
Is not the formation of the picture a "function" of the piece of glass
thus shaped?
So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff—[—Greek—]—a
noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain
of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the
brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the
consequence of the way in which the respective brains perform their
"function."
CCCLXII
The actions we call sinful are as much the consequence of the order of
nature as those we call virtuous. They are part and parcel of the struggle
for existence through which all living things have passed, and they have
become sins because man alone seeks a higher life in voluntary
association.
Therefore the instrument has never been marred; on the contrary, we are
trying to get music out of harps, sacbuts, and psalteries, which never
were in tune and seemingly never will be.
CCCLXIII
I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I
have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus
and thus have I learned it: go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on
my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to
take, on my authority, conclusions, the value of which you ought to have
tested for yourself.
CCCLXIV
There is endless backwoodsman's work yet to be done. If﹃those also serve
who only stand and wait,﹄still more do those who sweep and cleanse; and
if any man elect to give his strength to the weeder's and scavenger's
occupation, I remain of the opinion that his service should be counted
acceptable, and that no one has a right to ask more of him than faithful
performance of the duties he has undertaken. I venture to count it an
improbable suggestion that any such person—a man, let us say, who
has well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has graduated in
all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all
the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them; who has felt
the burden of young; lives entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with
his dead before the abyss of the eternal—has never had a thought
beyond negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that such an one can
have done his day's work, always with a light heart, with no sense of
responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the factitious
veil of Isis—the thick web of fiction man has woven round nature—is
stripped off.
CCCLXV
If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as the expression, in a way
"to be understanded of the people," of the total exclusion of chance from
a place even in the most insignificant corner of Nature, if it means the
strong conviction that the cosmic process is rational, and the faith that,
throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not
only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all
truths. As it is of more consequence for a citizen to know the law than to
be personally acquainted with the features of those who will surely carry
it into effect, so this very positive doctrine of Providence, in the sense
defined, seems to me far more important than all the theorems of
speculative theology. If, further, the doctrine is held to imply that, in
some indefinitely remote past aeon, the cosmic process was set going by
some entity possessed of intelligence and foresight, similar to our own in
kind, however superior in degree, if, consequently, it is held that every
event, not merely in our planetary speck, but in untold millions of other
worlds, was foreknown before these worlds were, scientific thought, so far
as I know anything about it, has nothing to say about that hypothesis. It
is, in fact, an anthropomorphic rendering of the doctrine of evolution.
It may be so, but the evidence accessible to us is, to my mind, wholly
insufficient to warrant either a positive or a negative conclusion.
CCCLXVI
It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration
recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah,
and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might or what might
not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point
should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.
CCCLXVII
Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and if all the world were
against me the fact might warn me to revise and criticise my opinions, but
would not in itself supply a ghost of a reason for forsaking them. For
myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the
neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to
whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its
weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.
CCCLXVIII
Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of conduct which
contribute to the welfare of society, and by implication, of the
individuals who compose it.
The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the individual
may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man. The rules of
conduct by which this end is to be attained are discoverable—like
the other so-called laws of Nature—by observation and experiment,
and only in that way.
Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the
generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent
with the ends of society. There is no more doubt that they are so than
that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who steals or murders,
breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection. He
becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature. Criminal
law indicates the ways which have proved most convenient for dealing with
him.
All this would be true if men had no "moral sense" at all, just as there
are rules of perspective which must be strictly observed by a draughtsman,
and are quite independent of his having any artistic sense.
CCCLXIX
The moral sense is a very complex affair—dependent in part upon
associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed
by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral
beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is
possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid
of it—just as some children draw, or are enchanted by music while
mere infants, while others do not know "Cherry Ripe" from﹃Rule
Britannia,﹄nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to the end of
their lives.
Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should
discharge any moral duty, except from fear of punishment in all its
grades, from mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is to
see that they live under wholesome fear of such punishment short, sharp,
and decisive.
For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty there is no need
of any other motive. What they want is knowledge of the things they may do
and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained. Good
people so often forget this that some of them occasionally require hanging
almost as much as the bad.
If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations)
obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is
weak? I can only reply by putting another question—Why do the few in
whom the sense of beauty is strong—Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven,
carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and always will.
People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes
on about them.
Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have great
respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could no
further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one
understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did
not.
CCCLXX
As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us.
Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As
there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so
there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight
not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up,
or extirpation.
CCCLXXI
The cardinal fact in the University questions appears to me to be this:
that the student to whose wants the mediæval University was
adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern
looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.
The mediæval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly
or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in
the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers.
Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by
deduction from ancient data.
The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the
application of scientific methods of enquiry to the ascertainment of the
facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the
ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to
make scholars as to train pioneers.
From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether
independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education,
combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not
primarily an institution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for
ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.
It is an institution in which a man who claims to devote himself to
Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what is
already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.
CCCLXXII
The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of
criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield to
it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and flatterers.
"Authorities," "disciples." and "schools" are the curse of science; and do
more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its
enemies.
CCCLXXIII
People never will recollect, that mere learning and mere cleverness are of
next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things
that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
CCCLXXIV
In my opinion a man's first duty is to find a way of supporting himself,
thereby relieving other people of the necessity of supporting him.
Moreover, the learning to do work of practical value in the world, in an
exact and careful manner, is of itself a very-important education, the
effects of which make themselves felt in all other pursuits. The habit of
doing that which you do not care about when you would much rather be doing
something else, is invaluable.
CCCLXXV
Success in any scientific career requires an unusual equipment of
capacity, industry and energy. If you possess that equipment you will find
leisure enough after your daily commercial work is over, to make an
opening in the scientific ranks for yourself. If you do not, you had
better stick to commerce.
Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man, who, as the
Scotch proverb says, in 'trying to make a spoon spoils a horn' and becomes
a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he might have been a
useful and a valuable member of Society in other occupations.
CCCLXXVI
Playing Providence is a game at which one is very apt to burn one's
fingers.
CCCLXXVII
I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has
been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application
of scientifc methods of investigation to all the problems with which the
human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional
beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.
CCCLXXVIII
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a
Messiah.
CCCLXXIX
I have not the slightest doubt about the magnitude of the evils which
accrue from the steady increase of European armaments; but I think that
this regrettable fact is merely the superficial expression of social
forces, the operation of which cannot be sensibly affected by agreements
between Governments.
In my opinion it is a delusion to attribute the growth of armaments to the
"exactions of militarism." The "exactions of industrialism," generated by
international commercial competition, may, I believe, claim a much larger
share in prompting that growth. Add to this the French thirst for revenge,
the most just determination of the German and Italian peoples to assert
their national unity; the Russian Panslavonic fanaticism and desire for
free access to the western seas; the Papacy steadily fishing in the
troubled waters for the means of recovering its lost (I hope for ever
lost) temporal possessions and spiritual supremacy; the "sick man," kept
alive only because each of his doctors is afraid of the other becoming his
heir.
When I think of the intensity of the perturbing agencies which arise out
of these and other conditions of modern European society, I confess that
the attempt to counteract them by asking Governments to agree to a maximum
military expenditure, does not appear to me to be worth making; indeed I
think it might do harm by leading people to suppose that the desires of
Governments are the chief agents in determining whether peace or war shall
obtain in Europe.
CCCLXXX
I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the
white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And
the importance of scientific method in modern practical life—always
growing and increasing—is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation
of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are
the strength of the priests.
CCCLXXXI
There is such a thing as a science of social life, for which, if the term
had not been so helplessly degraded, Politics is the proper name.
Men are beings of a certain constitution, who, under certain conditions,
will as surely tend to act in certain ways as stones will tend to fall if
you leave them, unsupported. The laws of their nature are as invariable as
the laws of gravitation, only the applications to particular cases offer
worse problems than the case of the three bodies.
The Political Economists have gone the right way to work—the way
that the physical philosopher follows in all complex affairs—by
tracing out the effects of one great cause of human action, the desire of
wealth, supposing it to be unchecked.
If they, or other people, have forgotten that there are other potent
causes of action which may interfere with this, it is no fault of
scientific method but only their own stupidity.
Hydrostatics is not a "dismal science," because water does not always seek
the lowest level—e.g. from a bottle turned upside down, if there is
a cork in the neck!
There is much need that somebody should do for what is vaguely called
"Ethics" just what the Political Economists have done. Settle the question
of what will be done under the unchecked action of certain motives, and
leave the problem of "ought" for subsequent consideration.
For, whatever they ought to do, it is quite certain the majority of men
will act as if the attainment of certain positive and negative pleasures
were the end of action.
We want a science of "Eubiotics" to tell us exactly what will happen if
human beings are exclusively actuated by the desire of well-being in the
ordinary sense. Of course the utilitarians have laid the foundations of
such a science, with the result that the nicknamer of genius called this
branch of science "pig philosophy," making just the same blunder as when
ne called political economy "dismal science."
"Moderate well-being" may be no more the worthiest end of life than
wealth. But if it is the best to be had in this queer world—it may
be worth trying for.
CCCLXXXII
Those who wish to attain to some clear and definite solution of the great
problems which Mr. Darwin was the first person to set before us in later
times must base themselves upon the facts which are stated in his great
work, and, still more, must pursue their inquiries by the methods of which
he was so brilliant an exemplar throughout the whole of his life. You must
have his sagacity, his untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his
readiness always to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was
demonstrably true, before you can hope to carry his doctrines to their
ultimate issue; and whether the particular form in which he has put them
before us may be such as is finally destined to survive or not is more, I
venture to think, than anybody is capable at this present moment of
saying. But this one thing is perfectly certain—that it is only by
pursuing his methods, by that wonderful single-mindedness, devotion to
truth, readiness to sacrifice all things for the advance of definite
knowledge, that we can hope to come any nearer than we are at present to
the truths which he struggled to attain.
CCCLXXXIII
Dean Stanley told me he thought being made a bishop destroyed a man's
moral courage. I am inclined to think that the practice of the methods of
political leaders destroys their intellect for all serious purposes.
CCCLXXXIV
It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can
never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be
certain of making them unhappy.
CCCLXXXV
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness,
ass-stubbornness and camel-malice—-with an angel bobbing about
unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as
they please, they are very hard to drive.
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