Chapter XI: Conclusion

The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution has taught us the lesson that, if we start without belief in the Divine government of the world, study of the process of evolution will not lead us to discern any Divine purpose in the process. Belief in religion cannot begin without faith in God to start with, just as belief in science or in morality is based not on evidence, but on faith. The question remains whether with faith we can believe that the process of evolution is a revelation of Divine love, and whether man's environment has been evolved in such a way as to promote in him that love of his fellow-man and God which is the religious ideal.

If we look at the structure of society, we see it is based on the fact that man has certain needs--of food, shelter, and clothing, etc.--which can be satisfied more effectually by co-operation and division of labour than by isolated, individual action. The man who earns his own living does so by rendering services for which he is paid: he cannot benefit himself without benefiting others to some extent. That is the law under which he lives, a law not of his own making, nor always to his own liking, but a law inherent in the nature of things, and part of the purpose, if purpose there be, in the scheme of things. As a free agent, man may co-operate with his fellows and take his share of the divided labour, or not, as he wills; but those peoples which have carried the principles of co-operation and organisation furthest have fared best. They have availed themselves of the opportunity offered them, and have survived. The failure of the rest to do likewise has not impeded the fulfilment of the Divine purpose that men should help one another. On the contrary, those who decline to help one another voluntarily place themselves at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, and are slowly, but surely, crowded out by those who fulfil the Divine purpose less unsatisfactorily, and in consequence tend to inherit the earth.

We have already seen that when a man reaches years of discretion he finds that the physiological and psychological mechanism of which he is now in possession, and for the management of which he is henceforth responsible, has a tendency to run in certain grooves: he has, as a child, been taught and has inherited an aptitude to think and act in certain ways. The same remark applies to the social organism. Before or when the individual awakes to the fact that he is a member of a society, he has already been or is the child of parents to whom he renders obedience, and between whom and himself there exist relations of affection. The evolution of man as a purely animal organism has been such that he begins life with a prolonged period of helpless infancy. Unlike the lower animals, which very soon after birth are capable of providing for themselves, he is for years dependent on others. His prolonged infancy is a prolonged period of plasticity, during which he is moulded into a member, first of a family and then and thereby into a member of society. All the higher animals give their offspring some education, an education as good as they received themselves: in the human race alone do parents give their children a better education than they got themselves. It is, however, not the rising generation alone who benefit by the long period of dependence and plasticity which characterises childhood. It is, of course, true that labour expended on the perfecting of tools and machinery is peculiarly productive, inasmuch as the increased efficiency of the instrument more than repays the greater outlay. But as the workman who produces the tool becomes in consequence of his labour a more skilled mechanic, so the education given by the parent to the child is an education not only of the child, but of the parent, and makes both better fitted to be members of society. It not only secures that subordination of the younger men to the elder, which is necessary for the stability of society and the permanence of the tribe, but it also tempers power with responsibility, responsibility not to some external authority, but to the higher principle within the man.

Thus even in the earliest stage of society the anti-social forces of selfishness and the passions do not operate _in vacuo_ and with nothing to impede them. Society at the very beginning is no _tabula rasa_: the field is already largely occupied, and the direction of social evolution already largely determined, by that affection between parents and children without which neither society as a whole nor the individual as a unit could come into being or continue to exist. It is an unwarrantable libel, even on savage society, to say that in it the ape and tiger predominate in man: the lowest forms of society survive only so far as there exists more humanity than brutality in the dealings of their members with one another. It is a false philosophy of evolution, not a true acquaintance with the facts of anthropology, which rashly assumes that the morally lowest must have been the only primitive elements in the evolution of humanity. The evil and the good in man have existed side by side from the beginning; unselfish affection, as well as selfish desires, has always been part of the equipment of human nature, though the evolution of the former may be a longer and more difficult process, both in the individual and the race, than the evolution of the latter.

In the race moral progress may be expected with much more confidence than it can in the case of the individual. The mere existence of a society, however simple in structure, is of itself proof that the anti-social forces of selfishness and passion are in it less strong than the instincts of neighbourliness and mutual help. Of competing societies those eventually triumph which are least weakened by internal dissension--that is to say, those societies tend to thrive and extend most of which the members are most ready to subordinate their private ends to the public good. Ultimately it is only by the development of this type of individual character that a society can achieve success; and it is this type of character that the competition between nations develops. But essential as it is to the survival of a society, it is by no means so essential to the survival of the individual in his struggle for existence against other individuals. If, then, society were simply a collection of warring atoms, or if the individual's whole activity were expended in struggling with his neighbour and trying to elbow him out, the type of character essential to the survival of society could never be developed, and society itself could neither come into being nor continue to be. The fact is that men not only compete, but co-operate: society is, and from the beginning has been, an organisation requiring from each of its parts some subordination to the interests of the whole.

As the organisation of society grows more complex, the individual becomes less and less capable of existing independently of society, society becomes more and more independent of the services of any individual member, and both these facts tend to foster the social and weaken the anti-social forces in man. Increasing division and subdivision of labour specialises the function of each member of the community more and more, and so deprives him of the general aptitude for doing all kinds of work which is essential to every man who is, as for instance in a new colony, thrown largely on his own resources. Thus the solitary existence which might be just possible for the outcast from a savage tribe becomes a practical impossibility for the average member of any community that has risen above that stage of social evolution. At the same time the point is reached when no one man is indispensable to the community. Society is made up of units so similar to one another that any one can be replaced by some other, and, as a matter of fact, the place of everyone is at death filled by some successor.

The theory of a social contract, as a historical or prehistorical event in the development of any community, has long been rightly discredited: at no time did a number of men, living solitary lives, have a public meeting and formally contract to live together on certain conditions and for certain ends. Man has been a gregarious, if not social, animal from the beginning. Nevertheless, man has certain needs, desires, and ends which can only be satisfied by means of social organisation, and which are quite as potent in holding society together as if, instead of being tacitly at work, they had been proclaimed aloud in a formal social contract. If through any disease the social organism obstructs, or fails to assist in realising, those ends, the dissatisfaction of the individual and the danger to the state are just as great as if a formal contract had been violated: the disappointment of the normal and reasonable expectations of the members of the community is substantially injustice, and is not altogether erroneously stated to be a violation of the common and tacit understanding on which society is in fact if not formally established. Co-operation in labour does imply some sort of engagement, expressed or understood, that the joint product shall be divided more or less fairly between the joint producers. Unfairness in the distribution of social benefits may be of slow growth, but must eventually result in undisguised resentment--appeal is made openly and consciously to justice, which henceforth becomes the ideal of a section at least of the community, and is recognised as a condition without which a healthy social existence is impossible.

It is thus a monstrous perversion of the plain facts to represent the struggle for existence as having been the sole or the main factor in social evolution: every member of a community is born into an atmosphere of co-operation and maintains his existence by the co-operation of others. If he must labour to live, he cannot labour for himself without at the same time rendering service to others; the very same conditions which make him desire justice for himself constrain him to maintain justice for the community at large. The social environment is, and has always been, such as to lead man in the paths of justice and to train him for the service of his fellow-man. The units which constitute the social environment are men, beings whose physical, mental, and moral structure is the result of a long process of evolution stretching back to beyond the beginnings of life upon this earth, a process which, assuming it to have had purpose, was designed to include in its effects a creature capable of justice and of love.

The full development of the sentiment of justice has been the work of many centuries. At first, when the community is small and nomad, the idea that a stranger has a right to justice is incomprehensible. Even when with the growth of civilisation provision is made for according foreign merchants and others some protection from the law, the idea that the stranger has the same right to justice as the citizen is neither admitted by law nor entertained as a speculation. Indeed, the law, modest though it be, may be in advance of public opinion and of the practice of officials--witness the extortions practised by Roman governors on the Roman provinces. Eventually, however, public opinion outstrips the law and pronounces that even the colour of a man's skin cannot bar his claims to justice, and that the inhabitants of a country, though they be aborigines, have some rights in it. Finally comes philosophy and pronounces justice, absolute and stern, the one thing needful, the one and only duty which it is within the sphere and function of government to maintain.

Unfortunately for the philosophy which maintains this view, it happens that, just when the authority of justice is admitted by the conscience of civilisation to be paramount, justice as an ideal is recognised to be neither capable of realisation nor absolutely desirable. It is obvious that in the best-regulated even of free communities the amount of justice which can be secured by the action of the law and the intervention of the State falls very far short of the ideal; and the multiplication of laws and State inquisitors, which would be necessary if every form of injustice and wrong-doing were to be punished by the State, would be a remedy, if indeed it were a remedy, worse than the disease. It is impossible to pretend to believe that wealth is distributed according to merit in any existing community, or that any governmental system, even if designed solely with that end in view, could ever determine what a man's merits were, or what his reward should be. Nor is the ill distribution of wealth the only factor of injustice, though it is the only factor with which the State could make pretence to deal: sickness and sorrow, grief and pain--nay, the very capacity for suffering and for joy--are dealt to different men in very different measure. It is plain matter of fact that earthly goods and pleasures are not distributed according to merit; and it is just when man's conquest of Nature has become most complete, when society is no longer struggling for a bare subsistence, when the demand for justice is most fully and unreservedly admitted, that the impossibility of meeting the demand and the danger of failing to meet it become most manifest. The poverty which accompanies progress may in one generation be less than it was in the previous generation, but the extremes of poverty and wealth grow daily wider apart, and the number of those who are poor increases in a growing population much more rapidly than the number of the rich. The danger which this rent in the social fabric threatens to the whole structure of society may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. The mere justice of individualism which has hitherto sufficed to hold society together, suffices now no longer. The justice which limits itself to the fulfilment of those actions to the non-performance of which a legal penalty is attached, is not the one and only thing needful, nor does its force remedy the numerous cases of undeserved misfortune and suffering which the working of our social and industrial system entails. What heals the suffering and saves it from becoming a festering sore that might prove fatal to society, is that love of man for his fellow-man, which is manifested to the poor by the rich to some extent, but chiefly by the poor. The State can only prescribe and enforce external acts of justice; and the external acts which it prescribes are not the bond which holds or can hold society together. The State, in its attempts to modify society through the individual, is as clumsy as the breeder or the gardener in dealing with animals and plants, and must fain be content if it can modify some of the more prominent external characteristics. Nature is much more searching, and, if slower, much more thorough: the real nature of her work, the true character of the force on which she has made the cohesion of society to depend, becomes obvious at the time when the insufficiency of mere justice for the purpose becomes apparent. Imperfect though man's obedience has been to the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," it is to his obedience that society owes its maintenance.

As a matter of fact, then, strict justice is not and cannot be realised in this world. Even the forces of the social environment which are, to a large extent, under man's own control are not and cannot be so directed by him as to secure rewards and punishments in exact proportion to merit and demerit; while the action of those natural forces which distribute fortune and misfortune, pain and the susceptibility to pain, pleasure and the capacity of enjoyment, is still less under his control and, as far as we can see, is still less proportionate to desert. The fields of the unjust benefit as much as those of the just by the rain from heaven; the labourers who enter the vineyard of civilisation at a late hour receive as great a reward as their predecessors who bore the heat and burden of the day, or even greater; when a tower in our social fabric falls, it is not the guilty who are alone or even specially involved in its ruin. From the time of Theognis, at least, men have inquired with despair how the gods could expect worship when they suffered these things to be; and as long as we look upon life as though we were detached spectators, with no care for it save a disinterested desire to see justice done, it is easy for us to declaim upon the absolute indifference of the cosmic process to man and his deserts. But this detached attitude is purely artificial, and we could not make even the semblance of long maintaining it, did we not unconsciously glide into the more natural, but less warrantable, position of tacitly assuming that our own personal lot would be improved if strict justice were done. But is not our resentment against the injustice of the world partly premature and somewhat shallow and short-sighted? Are we sure we want strict justice? Are we so anxious to have our merits weighed? are they so imposing? Can we pray that we may be rewarded after our iniquities? If society could by some supernatural power deal strict justice to all its members, who _would_, who _could_ live in it? As a matter of fact--to say it once more--it is not by law alone that society lives, but by love, by the long-patient love of father or mother, of wife or husband, of friend or neighbour, which every one of us has accepted and none has fully requited. Our very hospitals are open to all who need them, to those whose suffering is due to their own negligence, or even crime, and not merely to those whose pain is undeserved. A palpable injustice, worthy of the cosmic process itself! And what excuse, if justice, absolute and relentless, be our highest and worthiest aspiration, can there be for appropriating the reward of honest toil to the often fruitless task of offering to those, who have by their own vice sunk into the depths, one last chance of life and of redemption? The mercy which falleth, like the gentle rain from heaven, alike upon the unjust and the just, must be judged by the same standard that we apply to the cosmic process. We may, like the elder brother of the prodigal son, refuse to see anything in man or Nature but a world given up to gross injustice--persons so superior as to stand in no need of forgiveness and no fear of judgment are able doubtless to judge the world and their fellow-man. But the prodigal himself may, perchance, better understand some of the workings of his father's heart, and trust he sees in the apparent injustice of Nature more instances of that mercy which would not have showed itself to him had justice measured love.

It seems, then, that the "ethical process" and the "cosmic process" are not so absolutely opposed to one another as Professor Huxley endeavoured to make out. Both at times act with a calm disregard of justice. In the one case we know that it is a higher principle which takes the place of justice; and it is a reasonable conjecture that the ethical process, which is one outcome or manifestation of the cosmic process, does but reproduce, in this case as in others, the action of the cosmic force which operates through the heart of man as well as through the rest of the universe. It is at any rate inconsistent to condemn the cosmos for exhibiting that quality of mercy which we rank highest amongst the attributes of man: if we take credit to our fellow-men for that quality, in fairness let us give the cosmos the same credit when it displays the same quality. If, as we assume in this chapter, there is purpose in evolution, let us admit that there is some presumption that it is a purpose of love and of mercy.

As it is by faith in science that men of science succeed in solving problems which, for a time, seem beyond the powers of science to deal with, so it is on faith in religion that the religious explanation of the universe depends for its slow but sure extension. With that faith we may succeed in seeing, to some slight extent, that the unequal distribution of pain, as well as of earthly prosperity, is not incompatible with a Divine purpose in evolution. For that faith we must believe that the suffering and sorrow from which none of us is exempt are not evil, unless we choose to make them so, but opportunities for good. Indeed, without that faith we seem forced upon the same conclusion: the man who devotes himself, his soul, his life to the relief of the needy and the suffering cannot make earthly prosperity his chief good, though, as Professor Huxley has said, he may attain something much better. But if we hold that there is something better than earthly prosperity, can we consistently declaim against sickness and sorrow as the worst of evils, or indict a universe because they are not unknown in it? The Stoicism which lent Professor Huxley the strength to teach that man must to the end declare defiance and resistance to the cosmos--resistance unavailing and defiance doomed to certain failure in the end--might also have taught him that the evil which he calls on us to war against is not in the cosmos; that the enemy of the ethical process has his headquarters not in Nature, but in the heart of man. Pain and sorrow are evil to the sufferer who allows them to make him selfish, and to the spectator who chooses to be callous to his suffering. If our volitions do count for something in the course of things, if we are so far free that we can, in response to Professor Huxley's call, doggedly and repeatedly resist the cosmic process, then it is of our own free will, also, that we do evil when the opportunity of good is offered us. Yet we charge the evil upon the cosmos.

_ὦ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται ἔξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ' ἔμμεναι· οἱ δὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπέρμορον ἄλγε' ἔχουσιν._