Chapter X: Appendix: On Bishop Berkeley's Idealism 289 (8)

The doctrine that the universe presents the mere semblance of purpose, that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is shared by materialistic systems in common with all those which consider that the only explanation that can be rendered of any given state of things is the assumption that it is the issue of some antecedent necessity which produced it. As we have already argued, the assumption of necessity as the ultimate explanation of things breaks down when we come to consider the beginning of the universe. If we assume an absolute beginning, then there can have been no necessity antecedent to that, and the beginning of things is left without explanation. On the other hand, to say that there never was any beginning is to admit that there never was any original necessity why things should follow the course of evolution which they have pursued--the initial collocation of causes was due to chance, was a purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms. When it is remarked that this is a strange assumption, that really, if the whole evolution process had been designed to reach the stage in which we know it and to attain the ideal which we surmise it to be capable of, the primeval atoms could not have been arranged better for the purpose, the reply is that the appearance of purpose is a delusion: true, as a matter of chance, the chances are millions to one against a fortuitous concurrence of atoms producing the evolution process that has taken place, but then the chances were just as great, neither more nor less, against any other of the millions of evolution processes that might have been evolved. We know the one that has taken place, and it is marvellous in our eyes that precisely this and no other should have occurred; but the wonder vanishes when we reflect that, had any other occurred, we should have been equally convinced, and equally erroneously convinced, that it could not have been produced by chance. The initial arrangement of things was, as it happened, such as to produce our evolution process: things might have chanced differently at the beginning; if they had, a different evolution process would have taken place, that is all. But it would still have looked like purpose, and would still have been due to chance.

But would it? The whole question is whether the initial collocation was due to chance or to purpose. To say that there might have been many other collocations proves nothing: an Almighty Power could collocate things in any of an infinite number of ways. To argue that every possible collocation, and therefore the one that produced our evolution process, must be due to chance, is simply to beg the question: the very thing we want to know is whether this or any other process could be due to chance. The argument that any and every other process would equally testify to purpose and equally imply design, seems rather to indicate that no conceivable evolution process could conceivably be due to chance.

Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at the beginning, the results would have been different. But they were not. And the fact that they were not is just the marvel which the necessitarian does not even explain away: in order to diminish the probability of purpose, he postulates countless possible alternatives to the original arrangement of atoms, and then he is embarrassed with the difficulty of getting rid of them. Why was this particular collocation determined on rather than one of the countless alternatives? To say it was chance may be true; but we want to know what reason there is for believing it to be true. If there is none, then neither is there any reason for believing the purpose that makes the evolution process to be an illusion.

But let us grant it was chance: chance, as everyone knows, is merely a name for our ignorance as to the real cause; so that to say it was due to chance is to say that, for anything we know to the contrary, the original concurrence of atoms may have been due to purpose. In a word, there is, on the theory of chance, no reason to believe that purpose either is or is not an illusion.

It may, however, be said that not only do we not know, but that we cannot know, whether it is an illusion or not. In reply we may either admit that all our knowledge--scientific, moral, and religious--is based not on knowledge, but on faith; or we may ask on what grounds this alleged impossibility is based. If we put that question, we shall find that the grounds are not altogether cogent. It is alleged to be equally impossible for the human mind to conceive either the existence or the non-existence of a necessity antecedent to the absolute beginning of things: therefore, in face of this inherent incapacity of the human mind, the truth about the beginning of things is unknowable and inconceivable. But, we venture to suggest, this alleged incapacity of the human mind rests on a false antithesis: it rests on the assumption that whatever phase of the evolution process we regard as the initial arrangement must either have been determined by some prior phase (in which case it was not initial) or not determined at all. But as a mere matter of logic, there remains the possibility that it may have been self-determined; and, as regards the evidence of experience, we are familiar with a cause which operates every day and which is self-determined, viz. the free will. There is, therefore, no such inherent incapacity in the human mind as is alleged; and the only inconceivability is that which is inherent in the theory of antecedent necessity, and not in the facts themselves. It is simply incorrect to say that if things cannot be explained by the theory of antecedent necessity, they are not capable of being explained at all. If the evolution process had been designed to follow the course it has followed, the initial arrangement of things could not have been better adapted to produce the result; and, as adaptation of means to end is the mark of intelligence, it is neither inconceivable nor irrational to suppose that purpose was immanent in things from the beginning.

But as it is scientific to argue from the known to the unknown, or from the better known to the less known; and as to know fully what a thing is we must know what it is capable of becoming or producing, let us pass from the pre-animal to the animal stage of evolution. It is the more necessary to do this because it was Darwin's theory of the origin of species which impressed upon the modern mind the idea that Nature mimics purpose, having none. Man, with the purpose of breeding a certain type of animal, selects those animals to breed from which possess, in the most marked degree, the characteristics which he wishes to develop in the offspring. But, as Darwin demonstrated, Nature, or the environment, by killing off those creatures which did not possess (or least possessed) the qualities necessary to ensure survival, "selects" animals of a certain type to breed from. Thus "natural selection" produces its results in the same way as human selection does; and presents every appearance of purpose, though the environment which produced the results could have had no intentions or purpose at all. But just as man does not create the animals which he first selects to breed from, so the environment does not create those sports or varieties which it selects to breed from: if they did not exist, neither man nor Nature could breed from them--no results, purposed or unpurposed, could be got from them.

If now we inquire about these sports, we are told science is content with the fact that they undeniably occur: wherever there are animals there are varieties in their offspring. That those which are adapted to survive will survive, and those which are not will not, is a self-evident, indeed an identical, proposition. It is; and it gives away the whole case against purpose, for it admits that some varieties are originally adapted to survive, that without them neither man nor the environment would have anything to begin on or work on, and that though man and Nature may develop, they do not create the original adaptation. They do but promote, by conscious or unconscious action, the purpose immanent in the sport. Of all the numerous, successive, imperceptible increments by which what was originally a sport is raised to a distinct species, not one is created by man or by the environment: all are the "gratuitous offerings" of the organism, manifestations of the organism's spontaneity, revelations of its latent capacities, fulfilments of the purpose immanent in it from the beginning.

If it be said that the survival of any or every given species was a matter of chance, because other sports would have developed into other species, if the environment had been different, the reply again is, But it was not; and, on the theory of necessity, could not be. The fact that both conditions--the organism's spontaneity and the environment's selective agency--were requisite to the production of the new species, and that both conditions were forthcoming, tells rather in favour of purpose than against it. The fact that this particular combination of conditions was effected, rather than any other, is on exactly the same footing as the initial concurrence of atoms: if the latter cannot be ascribed to any necessity antecedent to it, neither can the former; the reason of the combination is to be sought in the self-determining cause immanent in the conditions. The fact, if it be a fact, that countless other combinations were possible, and this alone was chosen, shows that the will immanent in the evolution process is free will.

In fine, Darwin has shown that the action of the environment is exactly what it would have been had it been designed for the purpose of selecting certain sports for development. All that is further necessary in order to show that this apparent purpose is an illusion, is to prove that the environment was not designed to act as it does. Pending the production of that proof, the argument remains incomplete.

The larger part of the process of evolution is known to us only from the outside: we observe its effects in the animal world and in inorganic nature, but its inner workings we have to reach by inference. One part of the evolution process, however, we know from the inside--that part which is carried on through us. We are some of the innumerable channels through which the motive force of the process is transmitted; and the knowledge which its transmission through us gives us is more intimate and direct than that which we get from observing the external effects it produces elsewhere. The evolution of society, for instance, is a part of the general process of evolution, and is a process which is carried on through us and expresses the resultant of the totality of our sentiments and actions towards one another. What light, then, if any, is thrown by sociology on the general question of purpose?

Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised us with the lesson that in politics and social experiments it is the unforeseen and unintended results of legislation which are far the most important, and that the industrial organisation of the country, or we may now say of the world, is not the fulfilment of any design preconceived by any governmental agency, but the unintended result of innumerable actions on the part of men who never dreamed that their action would have any such outcome. The reason of this is to be sought in the fact that society is an organism and that its growth follows the same laws as those which regulate the structural development of an amœba or a rhizopod. Thus, both society and the animal organism must be fed. To be fed, both must appropriate nutriment from the environment. That nutriment must be taken up and must be distributed to all parts of the organism, social or animal, if all parts are to be fed--and all must be fed, because all are mutually dependent, and to neglect one would disorganise the whole. Channels of communication must be established between all parts, in order that food may be conveyed from the organ which took it from the environment to the organs which require it for support. What marks the process of evolution in both cases is the increasing division of labour and the increasing interdependence of the parts on one another. The animal organism, like the social organism, is made up of a multitude of living units, each one of which is continually adjusting itself to the requirements of all the rest. The increasing complexity in the structure of an animal organism is possible only because the living units of one part take upon themselves new functions, or devote themselves exclusively to one function, in order to benefit the units of a distant part. If they purposed or were purposed to produce that result, they could not behave differently or better. But this appearance of purpose is mere semblance: the minute cells of an animal organism have no intention of producing even a rhizopod or an amœba. The explanation of this mimicry of purpose lies in the fact of the mutual interdependence of the parts: no change can take place in one organ of society or of the animal without being transmitted through the whole, just as you cannot remove one of the undermost of a cartload of bricks without more or less disturbing all the rest. But what is true of the bricks or of the units of the animal organism is true of the units of the social organism: what we discover in their action and reaction on one another is the operation, not of voluntary purpose, but of invariable laws of cause and effect.

According to this argument, then, the living units of the animal organism resemble in their action those of the social organism sufficiently to warrant us in arguing from the one to the other, and in concluding that there is purpose in the action of neither. But it is obvious that, if the resemblance is great enough to justify us in arguing from the animal to the social organism, it also opens the way for the argument to travel the return journey, from the social organism to the animal, and to reach the conclusion that there is purpose in both. Let us therefore consider what each of these two opposite conclusions requires us to believe.

On the one hand, before accepting the argument that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism because there is none in that of the animal, we must prove that there is none in that of the animal. But that, as we have already urged, is exactly what has not been proved: the utmost that science claims to prove is that the units of the animal organism do behave in a certain way. That way is exactly the way in which they would behave if they were designed to do so; and science leaves it, so far, a perfectly open question whether they were or were not so designed. The argument, therefore, that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism, because none in the animal, breaks down at the threshold. Yet it is on the unproved and unprovable assertion that the appearance of purpose in the animal organism cannot possibly be due to design, and must therefore be a delusion, that we are expected to deny the evidence of our own experience and consciousness and to believe that we, the units of the social organism, have no purpose in the daily acts by which we extend trade or discharge our social functions.

Thus the surmise that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is a conjecture which, so far as it is applied to the pre-human stages of the evolution process, simply plays upon our ignorance; and which, when applied to that part of the evolution process which is carried on through us, we know to be absurd. On the other hand, if there is such similarity between the laws of the one part of the process and the laws of the other part, it must be as allowable to argue from the part and the laws which we do know to the part and the laws that we do not know, as it is to explain the known by what is confessedly unknown. In other words, if the evolution of the social organism is known to be due to purpose, then it is a reasonable inference that animal evolution, which, we are told, follows the same line and laws, is due also to purpose--and if not to any purpose entertained by the cells of the animal organism, then to that of a Will of which their action is the expression.

It is, however, maintained that the continuous social changes which constitute the evolution of society, so far from being the result of the purpose of any individual or of any government, are frequently the very opposite of what was intended by the authors of the changes, and always are notoriously beyond our power to forecast. But the fact that my plans are modified or diverted by my successors or by my coadjutors does not prove that there was no purpose in my plans, or that there was none in the modifications introduced by my successors. And the total result of our united action and purposes may be something different from what any of us individually intended and yet express a common purpose, which is shown by the result to have been more or less present to all of us. A cathedral begun in the Norman style may have taken generations to build and may end in Gothic; and it will express the ideas common to the several builders, in much the same way that a composite photograph reproduces most distinctly the features in which all the persons photographed coincide, and other features more or less distinctly according to the extent to which they are shared in common by the different subjects. Or, to express the effect of the successive actions of succeeding generations, we may borrow an illustration from the game of chess. It is possible for five players to play, taking it in turns to move, so that every player makes one move out of five, and plays alternately for White and Black. The result, with good players, is a brilliant and well-developed game, which is not the game as purposed or intended by any one of the five players, but as continually modified and improved by each every time that he took it up. When, then, we reflect how many players in the game of life there are even in a small society, we can well understand that, though each has his own way of serving the common purpose, none can forecast the result.

Perhaps it will be said that the chess-players have a common purpose, and the players in life's game have none. The reply is that science assumes they have; science assumes that they play to win in the struggle for existence; and only on the assumption that men have common purposes is it possible to frame any scientific account of their actions. The science of Political Economy assumes that it is a common purpose of men to acquire wealth, and that their actions are determined by that purpose. It then goes on to show that if that is their purpose, then the conditions under which it can be and is effected are of a certain kind, _e.g._ men must buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. It is not necessary to assume, nor does Political Economy assume, that man can only purpose to acquire wealth, or that he must under all circumstances do so. In the same way it is wholly unscientific in sociology to assume that success in the struggle for existence is either a thing that man must aim at, or the only thing that he can aim at: the soldier dies for his country, the martyr for his faith. The institutions of a nation--legal, political, social, and religious--express the predominant purposes for which successive generations of the community have laboured; and the evolution of mankind is the history of the various degrees of success with which men have realised the ideals which they have purposed to attain. The successive reforms by which progress has been effected have all been purposed, and have all been purposed by men who believed, rightly or wrongly, that in so doing they were serving God and their fellow-men, and that the ideals of truth, justice, equality, fraternity, love, compassion, and mercy express God's will and the Divine purpose.

If, then, the outcome of the pre-human period of evolution has been, as a matter of fact, and amongst other things, such as to prepare the earth for man's habitation and to provide him with a mechanism, physiological and psychological, such that he can use it, if he will, to promote what he considers to be progress and advance, it is not unreasonable for him to regard past phases of evolution as so many steps leading to the realisation of the ideals which he cherishes, in his best moments, as his highest purposes. The continuity of evolution and the unity of its process authorise or even compel him to use that part of the process which is carried on through him as a means to interpret the rest. As, in the game of chess played by five players, each player inherits from his predecessor the game as it stands, and carries on, with improvements or modifications, the scheme which he inherits, so in life each player in turn becomes conscious of the ideals which he too may, or may not, as he wills, carry one step nearer to their goal. It is in the continuity with which these ideals are transmitted through one consciousness after another that the continuity of human evolution consists. We are, or may be if we choose, particles in the medium by which a purpose not our own (save inasmuch as we choose to make it so) is carried onwards to its destination. The medium through which progress has travelled in the past is Nature; the medium through which it is now travelling is human nature. By us the ideal, as it is transmitted through our consciousness, is recognised as implying the presence in us of a purpose higher than our own. Whether in the medium of Nature there is any dim consciousness of the progress towards which the changes in Nature conspire, we know not. But the uniformity of Nature and human nature requires us to see in those natural changes the operation of the same power travelling in the same direction as it does through us. In its passage through us it is made known to us as the object of our highest aspirations; the ideal of purity, of holiness, and love; the God for whom the human heart, mistakenly or not, has always sought, and never sought in vain.

XIV.