In studying the influence of Darwin and Darwinism it is well to begin by realizing clearly the orthodox religious conceptions which prevailed with the mass of mankind through the Middle Ages and well into the nineteenth century, as they prevail still in some form among large portions of the population in Europe and America. According to these conceptions the universe was created by an omnipotent, thoroughly anthropomorphic Deity. In that universe the terrestrial globe occupied a most important, if not a central and pivotal position. The globe was peopled by living beings, each created by the Deity in its particular form and kind, and all, like the whole existing universe, subordinated to man, who alone was endowed with a reasoning intellect and a moral nature. Thus gifted, he was an object of peculiar solicitude to his Creator, who interfered in every aspect of human fate, and whose favor could be secured and his wrath deprecated by prayer and by the conformity of human conduct to the divine decrees. In other words, the earth was the primary object of the universe, and man was the primary object of the earth, and hence of the universe also.
Charles Darwin
The Copernican theory, with the later development of astronomy. showing that the earth was not the center of the universe at all, but merely an insignificant and utterly inconsequential speck in the vastness of stellar space, gave this orthodox view a shattering shock. If the earth was of no consequence, how could man’s consequence be supreme? Theology, with its fortunate gift of agile adaptation, after first combating the new astronomy with all its zeal, finally worked out to a belated acceptance of what could not be resisted, and then ingeniously contrived, by huge effort of reasoning, to reconcile science with orthodox views and to restore man to his supremacy. But just when this had been happily and satisfactorily accomplished, along came Darwin, and shattered human distinction and superiority, and with them the ancient ideas of Deity, even more completely than Copernicus had done. It is no wonder that theology, exhausted by the earlier struggle, almost balked and gave up the contest.
What interests us first is Darwin’s own attitude toward the far-reaching consequences of his theory. That from the start he was conscious of possible effects is evident. He had lived closely enough in contact with the orthodox attitude to appreciate the results of disturbing it, and the deeper results of disturbing the fundamental principles upon which it was based. Nevertheless, he does not appear to have felt, or at least to have been haunted by the dread of a solitary and God-abandoned universe that afflicts some of us. His general mental attitude was so healthy and so practical that he was not too much troubled by remote apprehensions and dim spiritual possibilities. Thus he was inclined to take an optimistic view of the workings of natural selection. He believed that, on the whole, the sum of happiness exceeded that of misery for sentient beings, and he felt that indefinite progress and advancement for man was perfectly compatible with the conclusions to which his scientific study had led him. With these undeniably optimistic leanings on Darwin’s part in mind, it is amusing to read Lyell’s remark, that “he had frequently been asked if Darwin was not one of the most unhappy of men, it being suggested that his outrage upon public opinion should have filled him with remorse.”
At the same time Darwin was perfectly aware that his theories tended to shatter the orthodox view of man and his supremacy and even the orthodox God. Especially he knew well what fierce hostility he should evoke from those who had grown up in the orthodox belief, were wedded to it by all the force of habit and tradition, and were intellectually unqualified to adapt themselves to any other. Therefore, from the beginning, he proceeded with the greatest caution and moderation of statement. This arose partly from his sweetness of temper. He had no desire to wound or destroy, except as the truth might compel him to do so.
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On the other hand, where his conclusions were clear and well established, he meant to speak out, and let the truth prevail, without regard to the feelings of anybody. He wanted to sustain no cause, to push no argument for itself; he wanted facts and nothing else. And when he feels that he has yielded too much to popular prejudice and to the desire to conciliate it, his regret is decided and he determines to do so no more, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.”
As regards this world, in matters of morals, of conduct, and generally of the bearing of evolution on sociology, Darwin’s own sturdy moral habit and self-poised temperament made him perhaps unduly optimistic. Temptation had little hold upon him. Why should it have more upon others, even unsustained by celestial guidance and control? Yet the deadly, grinding, destroying implications of the struggle for existence do crop out everywhere, and the best intentioned efforts do not altogether disguise them, while Darwin’s undue optimism as to possible consequences appears, it seems to me, in a note to the Descent of Man. He is commenting on an article of Miss Cobb, in which she says, referring to his ethical explanations, “I cannot but believe that in the hour of their triumph would be sounded the knell of the virtue of mankind.” On which Darwin remarks comfortably, “It is to be hoped that the belief in the permanence of virtue on this earth is not held by many persons on so weak a tenure.”
When it comes to the bearing of evolution on another world, Darwin’s attitude is equally interesting, and equally inconclusive. To me one of the most characteristic and suggestive sentences he ever wrote occurs in a letter to Wallace, of August, 1872 (italics mine): “Perhaps the mere reiteration of the statements given by Dr. Bastian and by other men, whose judgment I respect, and who have worked long on the lower organisms, would suffice to convince me. Here is a fine confession of intellectual weakness; but what an inexplicable frame of mind is that of belief.” The implications here are almost fathomless, but it is clear enough that to Darwin belief was not a spiritual necessity of his being, but merely came with the overwhelming obtrusion of fact.
In regard to a future life, Darwin recognized that a belief in it was needed to complete the process established here. Yet when the question of the future has been debated over and over, the result, as “with other questions, is complete muddle and puzzle, and all that can be said of them is: “The conclusion that I always come to after thinking of such questions is that they are beyond the human intellect; and the less one thinks on them, the better.” What at least stands out is that Darwin does not greatly concern himself with the enormous dislocation of life in this world which is likely to follow the loss of belief in another.
And again, there is evolution and God. Darwin frequently insists that he is no atheist, and that his system must not be charged with any atheistical conclusion. The belief in God is eminently useful. At every opportunity God is given fair play and a fighting chance: it rests with Him to make the most of it. At the same time, the conflicts and difficulties are mountainous and it would appear insuperable. And the result in any case, if God is left in His universe at all, is to remove Him very, very far away, and completely to demolish all sense of His intervention in the little daily actions and experiences of common life and all intimate communion and conference with Him in regard to those actions. When the Descent of Man is published, Mrs. Darwin writes to her daughter, quite simply, “I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off.” For others besides Mrs. Darwin it reduced Him quite to the vanishing point.
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But if Darwin himself was content to let God alone, so far as possible, the more ardent and zealous of Darwin’s followers were inclined to hustle the Creator out of the universe altogether. This was especially true of the aggressive Darwinians in Germany. They extended the deductions of evolution to all the practical workings of human life in a fashion which Darwin distinctly disapproved. To Darwin’s energetic disciple, Weismann, the evolutionary theory seemed as solidly established as that of gravitation. And in Weismann’s opinion, evolution would go on creating adequate moral ideals, as it has done in the past. Häckel substituted an exuberant, triumphant materialistic atheism for the crawling superstitions of an earlier day.
In England Huxley endeavored to emphasize the complete separation of religion and science, though no one really knew better than he how fatally they interlock at every step. Spencer, in providing evolution with a metaphysical apparatus, extended its bearing into all the regions of speculative thought. It is not probablethatheismuch read at present, but his First Principles spread a wide leaven of Agnosticism among the youth of a generation ago, and I do not know where you will find a much more desolating statement of the possible barrenness of evolutionary results than in the conclusion of his Autobiography: “Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery – whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly through a past eternity and will go on unceasingly through a future eternity? And along with this rises the paralyzing thought – what if, of all this that is thus incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension anywhere? No wonder that men take refuge in authoritative dogma…Lastly come the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while simultaneously comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to realize, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of existence and the consciousness of having existed.”
II
After considering Darwin’s view of the practical working of his discovery, it is interesting to sum up, so far as is possible in such vague and indefinite matters, one’s own impression of the effect of the popular acceptance of that discovery. And here I must emphasize that I am not dealing with philosophical or scientific theories, least of all with any such theories of my own, but am simply trying to suggest what seem to me the indirect and secondary workings of scientific theory in the popular mind. It is hardly necessary to say that Darwin’s own teaching cannot be held directly responsible for those workings, and that many of them he would completely have rejected. Moreover, it must also be recognized that Darwin in large measure summarized and embodied the general scientific drift of the age. Nevertheless, the evolutionary theory may be regarded as typifying and formulating all these complicated tendencies more fully and effectively than any other. How these tendencies have worked is well suggested in the pregnant words of Professor Osborn, though he is careful to insist that it is the misunderstanding, not the understanding, of evolutionary doctrine, that has caused the evil: “It may be said without scientific or religious prejudice that the worldwide loss of the older religious and Biblical foundation of morals has been one of the chief causes of human decadence in conduct, in literature, and in art. This, however, is partly due to a complete misunderstanding of creative evolution, which is a process of ascent, not of descent.”
Let us attempt to follow the workings of evolution in various phases of life and thought. Take, first, politics. The great democratic movement of the past hundred and fifty years naturally far antedates Darwinism. Its roots were laid in the eighteenth century, with the teachings of the French philosophers, chiefly Rousseau, and the practical action of the American and French Revolutions. But the views of evolutionary science fitted admirably with the intense individualism of democracy, its prociamation of the right of the individual man to assert himself against every and all others, high or low, rich or poor.
After democracy has made its way in the world, it is interesting to see the effort of theology to claim it and to urge that the value and importance of the individual is a gradual effect and an essential element of Christian doctrine. It is true that Christianity has always proclaimed the equality of all souls before God and their equal need of salvation. But it is equally true that the Church has always got along comfortably with every sort of tyranny and for centuries solemnly sponsored the divine right of kings, alleging at all times the unfailing text, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” And it is more deeply true that the natural Christian emphasis upon the importance of another world tends to create indifference to the political concerns of this, so that even in the middle of the nineteenth century revivalists like Moody could regard political movements and reforms as matters of minor consequence in face of the imminent cataclysm which would wipe out this world and its doings altogether. The most vigorous and energetic insistence on the rights of man as a mortal came from those who concerned themselves very little with his immortality.
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And if indifference to the other world affected politics, it has had an even greater effect in the more general regions of sociology. So long as the poor and wretched were taught – by the rich that their sojourn here was infinitesimally insignificant compared with the bliss that awaited them hereafter, they could endure with comparative patience. Lazarus could let the dogs lick his sores with fair content while he was comforted with the reflection that an equally bad day was coming for Dives, and a great deal more of it. But when he became convinced that this world was all, Lazarus bestirred himself, and invented Socialism and Anarchism and Bolshevism and many other isms with capital letters, which might enable him to attend to the matter of Dives right here and to see to it that, if he could not share all the blessings of the rich, at least the rich might be made as miserable as he. Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a role in the arts that it had never played before, and the prominence of landscape in painting was as notable as natural description in literature. But during the first half of the nineteenth century this natural influence was romantic, imaginative, emotional. With the middle years the scientific tendency made itself felt, and art became more closely and intensely realistic. This is perhaps most generally obvious in the literary world, and the great novelists of France, from Balzac on, embody the scientific movement of which Darwin is so eminently representative. Most significant of all in this regard is the great epic of Zola, the history of the Rougon-Macquart family, in twenty solid volumes. I am not for a moment vouching for the solidity of Zola’s science, which may be quite as fantastic in its way as the romance of Dumas. The point is that Zola believed himself to be typifying and illustrating scientific tendencies, and that the popularly accepted notion of the struggle for existence, with all its blind and bitter cruelty, its pitiful tragedy of the warfare and merciless destruction of the animal world, was transferred to humanity in the endless pages, as gloomy as they are powerful, of the great French imaginative drama.
Thus scientific conceptions, working in the popular mind, have fixed it upon the affairs of this world, and have reduced the various phases of the other, formerly so immensely important, to a shadowy inconsistency. Science, for example, has disposed of hell with ludicrous completeness. The old material hell, as Dante and the Middle Ages viewed it, a repository definitely under ground, with devils busily engaged over boiling caldrons, has surely vanished, never to return. In the scientifically arranged physical universe there is no place for it. Even my friend Moody, whose ideas of heaven were so specific, does not attempt any such physical location of hell. And it is true that the orthodox still take refuge in moral torments, prolonged if not eternal horrors, which the erring spirit in wilful perversity inflicts upon itself. But it is doubtful if even the orthodox continue to take even these very seriously. There cannot be many persons who still suffer from the brooding gloom with which the concrete vision of hell genuinely oppressed thousands of sensitive souls in ages past. And this may be set down as a gain, since the misery to the sensitive souls was very real, while how far the fear of hell acted as a deterrent to souls of another order may be seriously questioned. But, gain or loss, it will hardly be disputed that the boiling depths of hell have largely boiled away.
Unfortunately, hell, in departing, has shown a marked tendency to drag heaven with it. The same material difficulty of course obtains here also. Moody used to proclaim that heaven was tangible, mappable, a city like New York, only with more agreeable streets and doubtless better traffic arrangements. But it is hard for the most devout believer today to take so concrete a view. And it is not only that the pearly gates and golden pavements have gone. Their disappearance has given a rude jar to the belief in any kind of future life whatever. I am merely speaking of the average American man in the street, and perhaps of even the woman also. The negative views in such matters announced shortly before his death by so good, so upright, so in the largest sense Christian a man as Luther Burbank, are beyond a doubt the views, more or less definitely formulated of millions of men in America today. The best they can say is that it their business to live the life here in the most energetic, straightforward, profitable way they can, to see that after their deaths their wives and children are provided for, and to leave any other lives to take care of themselves.
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And then there is the question of God, and it seems that He bas a tendency to vanish also, with the disappearance of His celestial habitation, so that I feel a touch of tenderness for departed grandeur in capitalizing the pronoun. The scientific sequence of cause and effect has permeated so thoroughly the minds of even those who do not think of it in formal terms that the old feeling of the intervention of Divine power in daily affairs and the old intimate relation with a personal Father have been greatly weakened where they have not been altogether forgotten. As Mrs. Darwin suggests, God grows farther and farther away. It is sometimes urged that this remoteness is connected with a deeper more serious reverence, but there is great danger of revering the Deity out of existence. In the Middle Ages men treated God as familiarly as if He were a friend round the corner, but they felt Him.
Worship, at any rate, Protestant worship, tends to lose its devotional character and the overpowering sense of the Divine presence, and to become a mere polite fraternizing for social purposes. You hear many people say that they worship God better alone in the fields than in the churches. As to some of the churches the feeling is natural enough, but I wonder how many think of Him on the golf links, except in the form of profanity, or in the hurry and swirl of traffic-crowded highways, or even in the fields, if anybody ever gets there any more. And prayer? It may be that more keep up the habit than we suppose. But with how many is it still a passionate intercession for divine help in their daily needs or a means of self-forgetful communion with the comforting, supporting, everlasting Arms? How many boys still pray to have fence rails lifted off them or to win in their games of baseball and football? Can we possibly conceive such a state of things as is indicated in Finney’s description of a revival a hundred years ago? “Indeed the town was full of prayer. Go where you would, you heard the voice of prayer. Pass along the street and if two or three Christians happened to be together, they were praying. Wherever they met, they prayed.”
The most striking of all the dislocations effected by the intrusion of the scientific attitude is in the banishment of sin. Not only original sin has been swept away with the disappearance of the older theology and the establishment of evolutionary doctrines, but the uneasy, haunting torment of conscience appears to have been greatly diminished. No doubt it still, as always, chiefly harasses those who have least need of it. No doubt some persons still vex themselves to agony for imaginary sins. But the bulk, especially of the younger generation, are like the heroine of Lemaître’s play, “a little woman who without any very definite idea of the meaning of positivism, Darwinism, struggle for life, etc., lives in a moral atmosphere entirely impregnated with all these things.” And as a consequence, her moral attitude undergoes the great transformation of the modern world, by which an old-fashioned sin becomes simply a new-fashioned mistake. In other words, expediency, the belief that it does not pay to do wrong, takes the place of the old divine sanction, divine command, divine reward and punishment.
There are many who take a very sanguine view of all this. To them it seems that the old, instinctive sense of sin was stupid and caused far more misery than it cured. Expediency, or enlightened self-interest, working with the larger interest of the community, is expected more and more effectively and satisfactorily to take the place of the older categorical imperative. But to others it seems that expediency is but a chill and slender reed to lean upon when the stress of passion and temptation come. The fire of hell was often a mild deterrent enough; but it is doubtful whether remote considerations of expediency will suffice to deter even so effectively as hell-fire.
To these old-fashioned and conservative persons it seems likely that the decay of a divine origin will weaken and break down the springs of moral action and that in an enlightened self-interest the enlightenment is hardly powerful enough to abolish the didmess. Some of these persons have even been disposed to see in the world war something at least of the culmination of evolutionary doctrines about the struggle for life and survival of the fittest; and it is certainly in the protest against these doctrines that the Fundamentalists find their best justification for attempting to set back and repress the movement of human thought, if there were any justification whatever for the unwisdom of the effort to dam the Mississippi with a sheet of paper.
III
When we turn from the popular acceptance of evolution and its workings, we may, if we choose, find plenty of interpretations of the theorists yielding a different result.
Long before Darwin’s day evolution, in the sense of a larger process of development and unfolding in the universe, had been foreshadowed and cherished by the philosophers. Not to speak of the Greeks, the successors of Kant in Germany had, each in his way, devised some dynamic explanation of the spiritual world.
Also, there are the philosophers who, obviously coming within the scope of evolution and Darwinism, transform and transfigure them with a certain divine radiance and spiritual change. There is William James. Forty years ago I happened to ride in a horse car opposite James, who was talking with all his splendid, eager enthusiasm to a pupil sitting beside him. James said that for a time he had been oppressed by the gloom of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Then he had pulled himself together and made up his mind that the true course for him was to get rid of all the evil within his own reach, so far as he personally could, and let the broader working of the universe take care of itself. Here we see the germ which later grew into the splendid fabric of Pragmatism, the belief that the Spirit, which made the world of evolving phenomena, was itself a thmg of dynamic growth and force, able to create by its own native energy a future and a reality and a God that should embody its highest ideals. A parallel development appears in the “Creative Evolution” of Bergson, the theory of the creative spirit perpetually evolving in richer, more splendid, more satisfying forms, through the eternal depths of a luminous future. From the day when Darwin’s views were first announced up to this very moment, up to the publication of such books as Professor Whitehead’s Science and Modem Thought and Professor Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution, thinkers have been busily at work devising interpretations and developments of the evolutionary doctrine, regardless of conflict and divergence, in the spirit of Professor Whitehead’s admirable saying, “A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity.” The results are somewhat bewildering, and perhaps rarely satisfying to any but the thinkers themselves, but they are at least stimulating and suggestive.
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Then there are the achievements of the clergy. As I have earlier pointed out, it took many generations of herculean effort to get the Bible and the Copernican theory into harmony, but by endless processes of the reasonable wriggling which so much amused Darwin in himself and in others the two were contentedly brought together. Then appeared this later disturber of the peace, and at first the theologians despaired. But when did a theologian ever really despair? Mankind must have God, must have Christ, must have the Bible, above all, must have a priesthood. If Darwinism did away with the first three, I ask you what would the priesthood do for a living? Therefore, the contending elements must be reconciled, and should be. Science in contradiction with religion? Fie! Never! Why, science only clarifies religion, and religion enriches and fructifies science. The marriage of the two is triumphantly proclaimed in the joyous cry of Doctor Cadman, which typifies a million others, and demonstrates that everything is for the best in the best of all possible clerical worlds: “So far from evolution being incompatible with religion, it is of all scientific theories the most easily accommodated to the demands of faith. In itself the evolutionary hypothesis supplies to all scientists and believers in religion one of the noblest conceptions of the creative mind to be found anywhere in literature. The idea of progressive development culminating in perfectibility contains the most radiant optimism extant today.” It would be difficult to improve upon the splendor of that passage, but it offers vast food for meditation. Somehow I turn from it instinctively to the comment of Darwin upon one of his orthodox admirers, “But how funny men’s minds are! he says he is chiefly converted because my books make the Birth of Christ, Redemption by Grace, etc., plain to him!” How funny men’s minds are!
The optimism of the scientists is quite as persistent and perhaps a little more convincing than that of the theologians. From the advent of Darwin’s theory there have been those, like Asa Gray, who persisted in regarding it as perfectly, luminously compatible with entire orthodoxy. Gray himself maintained this position with militant vigor, and Mivart, though far more critical of Darwin, contrived to reconcile the general principles of evolution with a long adherence to the Catholic Church. In our day Sir Oliver Lodge has reconciled a life of scientific research with spiritualistic beliefs, and even Darwin’s co-discoverer, Wallace, ardently advocated spiritualism to the end.
Others who are not quite so extreme in their.conclnsions yet insist that there is no conflict whatever between a firm belief in Darwinism and a spiritual hope. Especially scientistsof this type lay stress upon the benefits which enlightened scientific theory confers upon our life in this world. Evolution, according to them, teaches the splendid progress of man in the past and in the future, his enriching development, his enlarging solidarity in well-being and well-doing. When one reads these almost ecstatic interpretations of scientific possibility, one finds it really difficult to resist their rapture. Listen to the enthusiasm of Professor Conklin: “The past and present tendencies of evolution justify the highest hopes for the future and inspire faith in the final culmination of this great law in ‘One far-off divine event Toward which the whole creation moves ‘. ”
The religion of the future is to be no worse than that of the past: who knows but it may be infinitely better? “In the past religion has dealt largely with the individual and his relation to God; its chief concern was the salvation of individual souls and their preparation for a future life; it has been largely egocentric. The religion of the future must more and more deal with the salvation of society; it must be ethnocentric.” In the charming words of Meilhac and Halévy:
“C’est imprévu, mais c’est moral. Ainsi finit la comédie.” “Unexpectedly moral at that, It closes the comedy pat.”
To be sure, there are persons to whom all this ecstasy seems more gorgeous than substantial. I cannot help thinking of the bitter comment of Leopardi on the sciolists who were busily engaged in making a happy whole out of wretched component parts: “The lofty spirits of my day found out a new and almost divine scheme: not being able to make any one person happy, they forgot individuals and set themselves to making the community happy as a whole.” And he concludes:
“I know not whether to pity or to smile.”
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I confess that I am myself perfectly, enormously egocentric, and these ethno considerations appeal to me very little. In so far as the good of the race is ideutified with my personal comfort and wellbeing, I am interested in it. But my ego cries out for God simply for itself, and if it is to be wiped out like a dewdrop in the sun, words cannot express my utter indifference to the well-being of the race, of the world, and of the universe.
Nevertheless, it is probable that humanity will achieve some adjustment in this matter. Mankind has always demanded spiritual ideals and the divine presence, and always will demand them. If they are lost, it will re-invent them. If they are destroyed, it will re-create them. No doubt the speculations of the philosophers, the merry doings of the clergy, and the persistent optimism of the scientists will suffice to keep religion and the human soul and even God upon Their feet and to enable Them to carry on decorously through the dreamy flight of centuries to come.
IV
Meantime, it is interesting to consider how many of the great spirits of the last generation, and especially of those most intellectually influential, were profoundly moved by Darwinism and felt more or less its haunting gloom of destruction and its far-reaching effect. In Ibsen the struggle for existence shows in the intense assertion of the individual a and his passionate emphasis of the right to live and to develop himself, and the same tendency in Nietzsche grew into the cloudy and colossal phantom of the Superman. With Tolstoi the obsession of Darwinistic conflict and survival appears in the earlier novels, Anna and War and Peace; but in the end. like Zola or John Fiske, he found the pressure too great and too horrible, and endeavored to establish an antidote for human misery in human love. In Renan the subtle, delicate, enchanting irony serves only to make the fundamental, dissolving nihilism more deep and ruinous. Or our own American Henry Adams asks evolution to educate him, and asks in vain. All it can teach him is that terebratula can remain unchanged in its insignificance for centuries, while man evolves, yet in the end proves to be no whit more significant than terebratula. And Adams goes out, like a spent torch, uneducated, in the huge, unmeaning, whirling acceleration of theories and discoveries and plain sufferings and questions that must remain forever unanswered. Yet perhaps Adams was quite as adequate to the universe as Doctor Cadman.
There are, especially, two figures, not so important for the quality of their thought, but immensely important for the influence of it, who stand out as being overweighted and overcome by the evolutionary blight. Anatole France, following Renan, filled his books and his life with gentle, indulgent, kindly tolerance, with rare human insight and sympathy. Yet beneath it all, beneath the tender lenience of Sylvestre Bonnard,
and the kindly curiosity of Jérôme Coignard, and the patient comprehension of Monsieur Bergeret, always there was the sense of the nullity of human effort and the futility of human fate. All the motives and interests of men and women are reduced to the Darwinian residuum of self-preservation and propagation, or as France repeatedly puts it, more boldly and baldly, love and hunger are the two poles of our being. And when he makes intimate confession of the workings of the theory in his own person and life, this is the result: “It is said, ‘man is the lord of creation.’ Man is the lord of suffering, my friend. There is no clearer proof of the non-existence of God than life. . . . If you could read in my soul, you would be terrified. . . . There is not in all the universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me happy. I have never been happy for one day, not for a single hour.”
Or take the case of Mark Twain, far more important for Americans than France, because it may safely be said that few if any authors more influenced and to-day influence the youth of America than the creator of Huckleberry Finn. Mark, like France, was the kindest, the gentlest, the most humane of men and authors. His energetic sympathy and support were given to relieve suffering and oppression everywhere. But although he was not particularly expert iu science or philosophy, the virus of utter nihilistic disbelief had infected his soul as completely as that of France, and far more militantly. The destructive effects of the evolutionary teaching cannot be more fully displayed than in the arguments which Mark, to save his own credit,’puts into the mouth of Satan in The Mysterious Stranger: “A God . . . who mouths justice and invented hell-mouths mercy and invented hell-mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself: who frowns upon crimes, yet without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
In conclusion, perhaps one may introduce meself, not in the least as connected with all these distinguished pereons, but simply as a type of a great number d average human beings, who live and suffer and have to fight their way somehow through the blinding mist of years and tears. When I was sixteen or seventeen. I read the Origin and the Descent, and I think the impression they produced has never been obliterated. It is not, it has never been, the maintenance ot any deliberate philosophical theory. I am too utterly without intellectual training or equipment even to form such a thing. It is not any aggressivc or militant Agnosticism. It is simply a sense of utter insignificance in face of the unapprehended processes of nature, such as Leopardi expresses with bare intensity: “Nature in all her workings has other things to think of than our good or ill.” It is a feeling of being aimlessly adrift in the vast universe of among an infinity of other atoms, all struggling desperately to assert their own existence at the expense of all the others.
Apparently this sense of struggle among individuals, struggle everywhere, among theories and beliefs, as well as living creatures, does not affect everyone nitb the same oppression of distress. There are natures so healthily constituted that they have the mere joy of adventure in it, and can go on forever elbowing their way through the crowd of other nothings with the splendid affirmation of their individuality in the conflict. If it is a question of theories, they can say, with Professor Whitehead, “A clash of doctrines is not a disaster; it is an opportunity,” If it is a case of more material strife, they can disguise it with commits them all; who created man the ameliorationsof the social instinct, or such substantial optimism as has sustained President Eliot through his ninety years in the view that the joy of life is in “contest without conflict.”
More infirm, more frail, more douhting tempers may not take it so. There is the weary horror of endless multiplicity, sweeping from eternity to eternity. There is the embodiment of the universe in one individual, and yet the sense that that individual is more fragile than the universe itself, the sense that reduces all life and all one is to a mere shifting maze and complication of fleeting sensations, held together by the vaguest gauze of memory, and liable to be scattered and disseminated at any moment by the slightest shock. No doubt the corrective for such a dissolving terror is to live intensely in one’s own personality, without thinking of it, to emphasize every moment instinctively the huge importance of one’s ego, which, if it has its way, is at all times adequate to fill the endless spaces of the universe and to crowd out the major stars. But for some of us such emphasis is difficult to accomplish, and instead, when one is thoroughly penetrated by the evolutionary attitude, one is too apt to find oneself more insignificant than terebratula, because one is conscious of one’s own insignificance and terebratula is not.
And it was Darwin, the gentle, the kindly, the human, who could not bear the sight of blood, who raged against the cruelty of vivisection and slavery, who detested suffering in men or animals, it was Darwin who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked the universe for me and for millions of others.
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