Darwin

I

In studying the influence of Darwin and Darwinism, it is well to begin by realizing clearly the crude 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.

The speculations of Copernicus and the consequent development in modern 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, was at times inclined to balk and give up the contest.

What interests us first is Darwin’s own attitude toward the far-reaching consequences of his theory. In an earlier chapter we have considered his religious views, so far as they affected him personally. We are now concerned with the larger aspect of their effect upon mankind as a whole.

That he was conscious of possible effects from the start 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. He was sensitive to concrete fears: ‘You will then get rest, and I do hope some lull in anxiety and fear. Nothing is so dreadful in this life as fear; it still sickens me when I cannot help remembering some of the many illnesses our children have endured.’[154] But 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,[155] and he felt that indefinite progress and advancement for man were perfectly compatible with the conclusions to which his scientific study led him. As he puts it in ‘The Descent of Man’: ‘To believe that man was aboriginally civilized and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion.’[156] 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.’[157]

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. The sheer, simple statement of the matter appears in one vivid phrase: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!’[158] Especially Darwin 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. One early critic speaks admirably of ‘the magnanimous simplicity of character which in rising above all petty and personal feeling delivered a thought-reversing doctrine to mankind with as little disturbance as possible of the deeply rooted sentiments of the age.’[159]

It was this caution and considerateness that induced him to write such passages as the conclusion of the ‘Origin’ with its interesting introduction for later editions of the phrase ‘by the Creator’ in the last sentence.[160] And the caution did not result wholly from timidity or unwillingness to shock, but was also brought about by Darwin’s natural reluctance to commit himself in regions where he did not feel at home, or to take one step beyond the properly scientific province which he had really made his own. As to ultimate questions he confessed himself to be in ‘a muddle,’[161] and why should he interfere with the more definite creed of others?

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.’[162]

As regards this world, in questions 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? In ‘The Descent of Man’ he endeavors to show the social instinct as a sufficient and satisfactory basis for upright living: ‘We have seen that even at an early period in the history of man, the expressed wishes of the community will have naturally influenced to a large extent the conduct of each member.... Thus the reproach is removed of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of selfishness.’[163] And elsewhere he adds, ‘It is not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may be inherited.’[164] 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: ‘It may be difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her to destroy the young queens, her daughters, as soon as they are born, or to perish herself in the combat; for undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; and maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.’[165] While Darwin’s optimism as to possible consequences appears, it seems to me, in a note to the ‘Descent.’ 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.’[166]

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.’[167] The implications here are almost fathomless, but it is clear enough that to Darwin belief in general 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, in a passage I have quoted earlier, that a belief in it was needed to complete the process established here, and the dire necessity of the belief comes out clearly in the passage suggesting the tragic physical future of this earth: ‘I quite agree how humiliating the slow progress of man is, but every one has his own pet horror, and this slow progress ... sinks in my mind into insignificance compared with the idea or rather I presume certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of the progress of millions of years with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas.’[168]

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.’[169] 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: ‘Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical.’[170] The belief in God is eminently useful: ‘With the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality.’[171] At every convenient 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 obstacles and difficulties are mountainous and it would appear insuperable. Thus, there is the conclusion of ‘Plants and Animals Under Domestication’: ‘If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organization, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.’[172]

But 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.’[173] For others besides Mrs. Darwin it reduced Him quite to the vanishing point.

But if Darwin himself was contented 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: ‘What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany,’ he writes, ‘on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.’[174] To Darwin’s energetic disciple, Weisman, the evolutionary theory seemed as solidly established as that of gravitation: ‘We know just as surely as that the earth goes round the sun, that the living world upon our earth was not created all at once and in the state in which we know it, but that it has gradually evolved through what, to our human estimate, seem enormously long periods of time.’[175] And in Weisman’s opinion, evolution would go on creating adequate moral ideals, as it has done in the past: ‘The number of those who act in accordance with the ideals of purer, higher humanity, in whom the care for others and for the whole will limit care for self, will, it is my belief, increase with time and lead to higher ethical conceptions, as it has already done within the period of human existence known to us.’[176] 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 probable that he is much 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 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 throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout 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.’[177]

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 minds of vast masses of people, even of those conventionally connected with the churches of various denominations. 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 have completely rejected. Moreover, it must also be recognized that Darwin in large measure summarized and embodied the general scientific drift of the age. Especially we must not overlook the immense influence of practical as well as theoretical science in affecting contemporary life. An excellent editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature (May 8, 1926) emphasizes the importance of scientific invention and machinery on nineteenth- and twentieth-century living, and this importance, both direct and indirect, is almost incalculable. For example, printing has spread thought among the masses. The sewing-machine has changed the world of woman. The extraordinary development of transportation has enormously increased the superficial bustle and distraction of life, to the serious detriment of meditative and spiritual interests. Nevertheless, the evolutionary theory may be regarded as typifying and formulating all these complicated tendencies more fully and effectively than any other. How the theory has 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 world-wide 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.’[178]

Let us attempt to follow the workings of evolution in various phases of life and thought. Take, first, politics. We cannot perhaps establish two strongly opposed points of view in regard to the phenomena of political life better than by contrasted quotations. President Coolidge, speaking on October 29, 1926, said: ‘I do not know any adequate support for our form of government except that which comes from religion.’[179] Professor Keller, writing of ‘Societal Evolution,’ says: ‘What moves men ... is not thought, but emotion. And what sets emotion going is interest.... What sets the revolutions in motion, with the result of drastic selection in the codes, is not the cerebration of any one over great issues, but the unendurable discomfort and awakened emotions of the masses. Their interests have been so outraged that anything seems likely to be better than the present.’[180]

The great democratic movement of the past hundred and fifty years naturally far antedated 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 proclamation 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 Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’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.

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 himself could not share all the blessings of the rich, at least the rich might be made as miserable as he. We have become so gradually accustomed to an adjustment to the standpoint of this world that we hardly realize how completely and vastly it has entered into the views and opinions of even those who do not explicitly admit it.

Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a rôle 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. And it is interesting, as we come right down to the present day, to find a thoughtful critic attributing the ugly and realistic tendencies of current American fiction not to any passing upheaval caused by the World-War, but to just this gradual influence of scientific thought making itself felt everywhere: ‘What we are looking at is not the product of a decade or an episode, even so supreme an episode as battle, but the fructifying of scientific doctrines that for several decades have been seeping into society. What we are witnessing is the yielding of the romantic view of life to the scientific.’[181]

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 cauldrons, 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 in some respects 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 is always open to question. 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, mapable, a city like New York, only with more agreeable streets and doubtless better traffic arrangements. But it is hard for the most devout believer to-day 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 to-day. The best they can say is, that it is 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.

And then there is the question of God, and it seems that He has a tendency to vanish also, with the disappearance of His celestial habitation, so that I feel a pathetic 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 Providence 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 further and further away. It is sometimes urged that this remoteness is connected with a deeper and more serious reverence, that our relation to the immanent Deity has become more worthily and profoundly spiritual; but there is great danger of revering Him 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? I have spoken in connection with Darwin of my old friend who prayed, though he had nothing to pray to. 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.’[182]

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 and remorse 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 vast numbers, especially of the younger generation, are like the heroine of Lemâitre’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 impregnated with all these things.’[183] 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 comes. ‘Oaths,’ says Shakespeare, ‘are straw to the fire i’ the blood.’ The dread 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 selfishness. 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 an 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. Fichte had built his mystical metaphysic of the ego, Schelling had worked out his scheme of the adjustment of the I and the Not-I, Hegel had erected his superb logical edifice on the framework of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, starting with the elements of being and non-being reconciled in the progressive thesis of becoming, which in itself seems to have the germ of the whole evolutionary development. Schopenhauer and Hartmann had followed somewhat similar lines in their pessimistic treatment of the Will and the Unconscious. So again, the thinking of our own Emerson not only anticipates Darwin in such detail as the lines I have already quoted,

but is eminently suggestive of evolution in the intensely dynamic, developmental quality of his thought, which perhaps also, in its suggestion of a Pantheistic indifference to immortality, may be said to be as destructive to humbler human hopes as Darwin was.

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 thing 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 Modern 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.

And 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 others[184] 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 quite despair? Mankind must have God, must have Christ, must have the Bible, and above all things 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 Dr. Cadman, which typifies thousands of 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 to-day.’[185] 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: ‘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!’[186] How funny men’s minds are!

And then there come along those pestilent Fundamentalists, with whom some of us are much inclined to sympathize, and declare that Darwinism shatters the Bible and Christ altogether. But the Bible, as they read it, is infallible. Therefore Darwinism must be wrong: let us crush it, and grind it, and stamp it out of the world.

The optimism of the scientists is quite as persistent and perhaps a little more convincing than that of the theologians. There are first those whom, without meaning any slur, one may call the pseudo-scientists, writers who have had no special scientific training or experience or discipline, but who apply their quick literary wit to the consideration of evolutionary problems as of many others. If Messrs. Butler and Shaw and Wells and the rest cannot be said to have made scientific contributions of very great value, they have at least applied thoughtful, acute, suggestive analysis and stimulating conjecture in both religious and sociological lines.

The optimism of trained and professed scientists is, however, somewhat more serious and more important. 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 energy, 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 conclusions, yet insist that there is no conflict whatever between a firm belief in Darwinism and a spiritual hope. Especially scientists of 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

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 to a large extent 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.’[188] In the charming words of Meilhac and Halévy:

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.’[190] And he concludes,