Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

would seem clear that many of his hypotheses require to be largely modified, or even to be recast. This has been pointed out, with much cogency of reasoning and wealth of illustration, by Hartmann, whose admirable little volume on The True and the False in Darwinism should be in the hands of every student of Mr. Darwin's works. With these reservations, I cannot doubt that the law of natural selection, as he has stated it, largely explains the process of descent, or that the struggle for existence, the variation of types under circumstances, heredity, sexual selection, the action of environment, the use and disuse of organs, correlation, are really principles whereby the survival of the fittest is worked out. As little can I doubt the evolution of moral sentiment and dogma through prehistoric conditions, although I must take leave to question whether Mr. Darwin ever properly apprehended the essential nature of ethics. These facts are among the assured conquests of the modern mind. We may safely assume that, in another quarter of a century, they will be as generally accepted as the law of the earth's motion first demonstrated by Galileo, or the law of gravitation formulated by Newton.

How then does the Revolutionary dogma look in the light of these facts, so luminously exhibited by Mr. Darwin as the "scientific" account of

IV.] DARWINISM V. THE REVOLUTIONARY DOGMA. 123

the human mammal?

First consider the doc

trine of the natural, inalienable, and imprescriptible rights of the individual, which is the chief corner-stone of the whole Revolutionary edifice. How is it possible to predicate such rights of an animal whose attributes are constantly varying— whose original is not Jean-Jacques's perfect man in a state of nature, but, not to go farther back, a troglodyte with half a brain, with the appetites and habits of a wild beast, with no conception of justice, and with only half articulate cries for language? Of the absolute reason, which the Revolution professes to worship, usually under the strangest travesties, Darwinism knows nothing. notion of reason, as of justice and of relative. Right to be means Might to be. true state of nature is a state of war: bellum

Its only

right, is

For the

omnium contra omnes. Again, take the thricesacred formula, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. What place is there for these conceptions if "the scientific evolution " alone remains as the one truth which the Revolutionary gospel will allow us to recognise? Liberty? the sovereignty of the 'individual? It disappears with the fiction of a perfectly homogeneous humanity. The message of "scientific evolution" to the masses is to know their masters, for that will be best for them; to recognise the provision of nature, which has made the few, strong, wise, and able; the many, weak, foolish, and incompetent. Equality? Equality? So far from being the

"holy law of nature," as Marat was wont to affirm, it is flat blasphemy against that law. Inequality is everywhere her rule, and is the primary condition of progress. Why, man is nothing but the product of vast inequalities, of successive variations of previous animal types, which have constituted him a species, a race, an individual. Inequalities of right rest upon inequalities of fact. Fraternity? Yes; the fraternity of Cain and Abel. Cain survived because he was fittest, and proved his fitness by surviving. And in his story you have the brief epitome of the history of mankind, from the unknown beginnings of organic life, in the impenetrable past, down to this very hour. The Social Contract? A pure fiction! Darwinism gives the lie direct to the individualism which is of the very essence of Jacobinism. To nature, the individual is valueless. The natural goodness of the bête humaine? It is aboriginally unethical; ferocious passions are its very groundwork; and all that countless ages of progress have effected has been, more or less imperfectly to tame them in favoured varieties of it. To the panacea of "education," so confidently recommended on the ground that "the evil in the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions"-that, it will be remembered, is Mr. John Morley's exposition of this article of the revolutionary creed-Darwinism replies by the dictum of Mr. Herbert Spencer, that "crime is really connected with an inferior mode of life, itself usually conse

Iv.]

66

THE ONE FACT LEFT.

125

quent upon an original inferiority of nature;" that 'ignorance is no more to be held the cause of crime than various other concomitants"; that "the belief in the moralising effects of culture is absurd." There is not one of the most cherished positions of the Revolution to which the Darwinism, wherein it seeks a scientific basis-after having demolished God and the rest of the "old world"-is not absolutely fatal; while to the optimism underlying the whole political doctrine of Rousseau, it opposes the blankest pessimism. Such is the radical antagonism between Darwinism and the Revolutionary dogma. If, as we are confidently assured, "the scientific evolution" is the only fact left, then the natural, inalienable, and imprescriptible rights of man are dreams; there is no possible foundation for such rights in merely physical nature. For where there is only matter-as Herr Haeckel and M. Paul Bert, and I suppose we must say Mr. Darwin too, conceive of matter-there are only physical and mathematical laws sovereign over all. And the individual automata which make up human society, like all else, are the slaves of mere force. There is one, and only one, true natural right-or rather fact-founded upon the law of physical life, and that is the survival of the fittest.

Nothing is more certain than the absolute antinomy between the postulates of the Revolution and

those truths of physical science which the late Mr. Darwin has done so much to establish. Equally certain does it seem to me that the Revolution is in error in supposing any antinomy to exist between those truths and the great transcendental conceptions whereon religion is based. I will proceed to give briefly my reasons for this certainty.

All religions, even down to the lowest form of fetichism, rest upon an ethical feeling. Human nature everywhere bears about the concept of moral obligation, however various its correlatives may be. Everywhere, deep down in the most sacred recesses of consciousness, is the imperious conviction that

"because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom, in the scorn of consequence."

Nor does the internal monitor, which insists upon this tremendous obligation, fail to exhibit its credentials. "Conscience," says Butler-and the world will never outgrow that teaching-" conscience magisterially exerts itself, and if not forcibly stopped, naturally and always, of course, goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, which shall hereafter second and affirm its own." And, to the like effect, writes Victor Hugo, in noble words, worthily enshrining an august fact. "Let us take nothing from the human mind. Suppression is a crime. Certain faculties of man are

« ZurückWeiter »