Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work Part 12

But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or reasoning, _a priori_." This or the like applies to most of the recorded miracles. Huxley was extremely careful not to a.s.sert that they were incredible merely because they might involve conditions outside our existing experience. It is a vulgar mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to a.s.sert that things are impossible because they contradict our experience. In such a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable, and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have seemed impossible until recently. At the present time, the conversion of a baser metal into gold would be called impossible by everyone with a little knowledge of elementary chemistry. This last example leads admirably to a right understanding of the scientific view of impossibility. The older alchemists, partly from ignorance and partly from credulity, believed absolutely in the possibility of trans.m.u.ting the metals. The advance of chemical science led to definite conceptions of the differences between compounds and elementary bodies, and of the independence of these elements. The methods and reasoning of the alchemists became absurd, and no one would attempt seriously to trans.m.u.te the metals on their lines. These advances, however, do not give us the right to a.s.sume that the elements are absolutely independent, and that trans.m.u.tation is therefore impossible. Some of the most recent progress in chemistry has opened up the suggestion that the elements themselves are different combinations of a common substance. Huxley applied this particular argument to the miracle at the marriage of Cana.

"You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are inclined to think that the bodies which we have hitherto regarded as elementary are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or trans.m.u.te gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple."

Unless we make the unscientific and preposterous a.s.sumption that our present knowledge of nature and of natural forces is absolute and complete, it is unscientific and illogical to declare at once that any supposed events could not have happened merely because they seem to have contradicted so-called natural laws.

"Strictly speaking," Huxley wrote, "I am unaware of anything that has a right to the t.i.tle of an 'impossibility' except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square,' a 'present past,' 'two parallel lines that intersect,' are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense."

The whole matter turns on the question of sufficient evidence.

"Hume's arguments resolve themselves into a simple statement of the dictates of common sense which may be expressed in this canon: the more a statement of fact conflicts with previous experience, the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify us in believing it."

Again, expressing the same idea in different words, he wrote:

"n.o.body can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all s.p.a.ce) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionately strong expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any a.s.sertion that they had happened otherwise. It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which everyone who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all _a priori_ objections either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power. No one is ent.i.tled to say, _a priori_, that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail."

It was a question of evidence, and not only did the evidence not convince Huxley, but the thaumaturgic nature of the Biblical miracles provided him with additional reason for refusing to attach any extrinsic value to the contents of the book.

On the other hand, although he declined to accept the Bible as a miraculous and authentic revelation, again and again he expressed himself in the strongest terms as to its value to mankind, and as to the impossibility of any scientific advance diminishing in any way whatsoever that value.

"The antagonism between religion and science, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely fact.i.tious--fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance."

And again;

"In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 'And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?' If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion."

CHAPTER XVI

ETHICS OF THE COSMOS

Conduct and Metaphysics--Conventional and Critical Minds--Good and Evil--Huxley's Last Appearance at Oxford--The Ethical Process and the Cosmic Process--Man's Intervention--The Cosmic Process Evil--Ancient Reconciliations--Modern Acceptance of the Difficulties--Criticism of Huxley's Pessimism--Man and his Ethical Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.

We have seen that Huxley refused to acquiesce in the current orthodox doctrine that our systems of morality rested on a special revelation, miraculous in its origin, and vouched for by the recorded miracles of its Founder, or by those entrusted by the Founder with miraculous power. He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is no necessary connection between religion and morality. The one is an attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and proved by his own experience. So far as the conduct of life goes, the morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard to revelation and the unseen universe differs in no respect from the code taken under the protection of the modern forms of religion. As John Morley, in his _Essay on Voltaire_ wrote of such a person:

"There are new solutions for him, if the old have fallen dumb. If he no longer believe death to be a stroke from the sword of G.o.d's justice, but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with a wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger, not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen tribunal than as an ungrateful infection weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers."

But there are wider questions than the immediate problems of conduct. A certain type of mind finds it almost impossible not to attempt ethical judgments on the whole universe, not to speculate whether the Cosmos, as we can imagine it from the part of it within the cognisance of man, offers a spectacle of moral or immoral or of non-moral significance. In the old times of Greece and in the modern world many have been devoid of the taste for argument on such subjects. Those who are uninterested in these abstract discussions are rarely in opposition to the mode of faith surrounding them, as to reject the doctrines held by the majority of one's friends and a.s.sociates implies either a disagreeable disposition or an unusual interest in ultimate problems; they are usually orthodox according to their environment--Stoics, Epicureans, Jews, Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, Mormons, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or whatever may be the prevailing dogma around them. The att.i.tude of indifference to moral philosophy has practically no relation to what may be considered good or bad moral conduct; those characterised by it live above or below or round about their own moral standards in a fashion as variable as that of moral philosophers. Many of the saints, ancient and modern, have been notorious instances; question them as to their faith or as to the logical foundation of their renunciations and they will tell you in simple honesty or make it plain by their answers that they have no head for logic, that they cannot argue, but only know and feel their position to be true. In addition to the saints, many of the best and most of the pleasant people in the world are of this type.

The type strongly in contrast with the foregoing is found in persons of a more strenuous, perhaps more admirable but less agreeable character. The savour of acerbity may be a natural attribute of the critical character, and it is certainly not lessened where moral philosophy is the subject-matter of the criticism. The continual search after solutions of problems that may be insoluble at least makes the seekers excellent judges of wrong solutions. Like Luther and Loyola and Kant, they may be able to satisfy themselves, or, like Huxley, they may remain in doubt, but in either case they are excellent critics of the solutions of others. They are the firebrands of faith or of negation; they are possessed by an intellectual fury that will not let them cease from propagandising. They must go through the world as missionaries; and the missionary spirit is dual, one side zealous to proclaim the new, the other equally zealous to denounce the old. But theirs is the great work, "to burn old falsehood bare," to tear away the incrustations of time which people have come to accept as the thing itself, and in their track new and lively truth springs up, as fresh green follows the devastations of fire.

To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and of sufficient difficulty to make our decisions in the little eddies of good and evil that form as the world-stream breaks round our individual lives.

Huxley strove to interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its movements into the ethical language of man. As knowledge of the forces and movements of the Cosmos has increased so has our general conception been intensified, our conception of it as a wondrous display of power and grandeur and superhuman fixity of order. But are the forces of the Cosmos good or evil? Are we, and the Cosmos of which we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the p.a.w.ns in a game of the G.o.ds, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many Eastern religions? Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world teaches? And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of evil?

Huxley's interest in these great problems appears and reappears throughout his published writings, but his views are most clearly and systematically exposed in his "Romanes" lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and afterwards republished with a prefatory essay in the last volume of his _Collected Essays_. Not long before his death, Professor Romanes, who had come to live in Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the purpose of which was that once a year a distinguished man should address the University on a subject neither religious nor political.

Mr. Gladstone was the first lecturer, and, at the suggestion of the founder, Huxley was chosen as the second. For years he had been taking a special interest in both religion and politics, and he was not a little embarra.s.sed by the restrictions imposed by the terms of the foundation, for he determined to make ethical science the subject of his address, and

"ethical science is, on all sides, so entangled with religion and politics, that the lecturer who essays to touch the former without coming in contact with either of the latter, needs all the dexterity of an egg-dancer, and may even discover that his sense of clearness and his sense of propriety come into conflict, by no means to the advantage of the former."

As Huxley, on that great occasion, ascended the rostrum in the Sheldonian theatre, very white and frail in his scarlet doctor's robes, there must have been present in his mind memories of the occasion, four-and-thirty years before, when he first addressed an audience in the University of Oxford. Then he was a young man, almost unknown, rising to lead what seemed a forlorn hope for an idea utterly repugnant to most of his hearers. Now, and largely by his own efforts, the idea had become an inseparable part of human thought, and Huxley himself was the guest to whom the whole University was doing honour.

Graduates from all parts of England had come to hear what, it was feared, might be his last public speech, and practically every member of the University who could gain admission was present. The press of the world attended to report his words as if they were those of a great political leader, about to decide the fate of nations. Although his voice had lost much of its old sonorous reach, and although the old clear rhythms were occasionally broken by hesitancies, the magic of his personality oriented to him every face.

It is a curious and striking circ.u.mstance, a circ.u.mstance fully recognised by Huxley himself, that in this exposition of his ethical conception of the Cosmos he reconstructed, on the lines of his evolutionary philosophy one of the oldest and most widespread theories, a theory again and again reached by men of different civilisations and epochs. Manes, the Persian, from whose name the word "Manicheism" has been coined to denote his doctrine, taught in perhaps the most explicit fashion that the Cosmos was the battle-ground of two contending powers,--Ahriman, the principle of evil, and Ormuzd, the principle of good. This doctrine in some form or other is implicit in most of the greater religions, some of which have a.s.sumed an ultimate triumph for the principle of good, while others have left the issue doubtful. The Ahriman of Huxley, the principle of evil, is what he termed the cosmic process, that great play of forces, by which, in a ruthless struggle for existence, the fittest (by which is meant the most suited to the surrounding conditions and not necessarily the ethically best) have survived at the expense of the less fit. The Ormuzd, the principle of good, is what Huxley called the Ethical process, the process by which sentient, intelligent, and moral man has striven to replace the "old ape and tiger methods" of the cosmic process, by methods in which justice and mercy, sacrifice and consideration for others have a part.

To explain clearly the distinction he made between the ethical and cosmic processes. Huxley, in the prefatory essay ("Prolegomena") published in the volume with his Romanes lecture, developed the a.n.a.logy of a cultivated garden reclaimed from surrounding wild nature.

He described how the countryside, visible from his windows at Eastbourne, had certainly been in a "state of nature" about two thousand years ago when Caesar had set foot in Britain and had made the Roman camps, the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of England.

"Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of the Downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry.

The native gra.s.ses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse, contended with one another for possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales, which swept with unbroken force, now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of overground and underground ravagers.

One year with another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be doubted that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed in this region for many thousand years before the coming of Caesar; and there is no a.s.signable reason for denying that it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity except for the intervention of man."

This present state of nature, he explained, is only a fleeting phase of a process that has gone on for millions of years. Under the thin layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea, when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of an African forest.

"Before the deposition of the chalk, a vastly longer period elapsed, throughout which it is easy to follow the traces of the same process of ceaseless modification and of the same internecine struggle for existence of living things; and when we can go no further back, it is not because there is any reason to think we have reached the beginning, but because the trail of the most ancient life remains hidden or has become obliterated."

The state of nature, then, is a fleeting and impermanent process.

"That which endures is not one or other a.s.sociation of living forms, but the process of which the Cosmos is the product and of which these are among the transitory expressions. And in the living world, one of the most characteristic features of this cosmic process is the struggle for existence, the compet.i.tion of each with all, the result of which is the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the Downs is seen in the turf with its weeds and gorse. Under the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to survive."

For three or four years, the state of nature in a small portion of the Downs surrounding Huxley's house had been put an end to by the intervention of man.

"The patch was cut off from the rest by a wall; within the area thus protected the native vegetation was, as far as possible, extirpated, while a colony of strange plants was imported and set down in its place. In short, it was made into a garden. This artificially treated area presents an aspect extraordinarily different from that of so much of the land as still remains in the state of nature outside the wall. Trees, shrubs and herbs, many of them appertaining to the state of nature in remote parts of the globe, abound and flourish. Moreover, considerable quant.i.ties of vegetables, fruit, and flowers are produced, of kinds which neither now exist nor have ever existed except under conditions such as obtain in the garden and which therefore are as much works of the art of man as the frames and gla.s.s-houses in which some of them are raised. That the 'state of art' thus created in the state of nature by man, is sustained by and dependent on him, would at once become apparent if the watchful supervision of the gardener were withdrawn, and the antagonistic influences of the general cosmic process were no longer sedulously warded off, or counteracted."

He proceeds to describe how, under such circ.u.mstances, the artificial barriers would decay, and the delicate inhabitants of the garden would perish under the a.s.saults of animal and vegetable foes. External forces would rea.s.sert themselves and wild nature would resume its sway. While, in a sense, he had strenuously advocated the unity of all nature, he found in it two rivals: the artificial products of sentient man and the forces and products of wild nature. These two he believed to be in inevitable opposition and to represent the good and the evil forces of the world.

In the dim ages of the past, the forces that have gone to the making of man have been part of the cosmic process. In the endless and wonderful series of kaleidoscopic changes by which, under the operation of natural laws, the body, habits, and the character of man have been elaborated slowly from the natal dust, there is the widest field for the operation of the most acute intelligence to study and trace the stages in the process. But if intellectual delight in studying the process be left out of account, a serious question at once appears. In the higher stages of evolution the cosmic forces, ceasing to act merely on insentient matter, have operated on sentient beings, and in so doing have given rise to the mystery of pain and suffering. When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence. But "pain, the baleful product of evolution, increases in quant.i.ty and in intensity with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its highest level in man." And so it comes about that the cosmic process produces evil, sorrow, and suffering. Consideration of the cosmic process leads up against the mystery of evil.

Huxley argued that the various philosophies and civilisations of the past had led by different paths to a similar conclusion. The primitive ethical codes of man were not unlike the compacts of a wolf-pack, the understanding to refrain from mutual attack during the chase of a common prey. Conceptions of this kind became arranged in codes and invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike, material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes, produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With these came the "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." The doubting intellect, acting on the codes, produced the conception of justice-in-itself, of merit as divorced from the effect of action on others, the abstract idea of goodness.

The old philosopher, turning from this new conception to the Cosmos, found that incompatible with goodness. Suffering and sorrow, sunshine and rain, were distributed independently of merit. With Greek and Semite and Indian the conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature. Instead of bringing in a verdict of guilty, they attempted reconciliation in various ways. Indian speculation invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the Karma or soul-character pa.s.sed from individual to individual, the algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to merit. The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent First Cause. Evil was incompatible with this, and so they held, against experience, that either it did not exist, or that it was inflicted for our benefit or due to our fault. In one fashion or another, all the great systems of thought had recognised the antagonism and had attempted some explanation of it. Huxley's view was that the modern world with its new philosophy was only retreading the toil-worn paths of the old.

Scientific optimism was being replaced by a frank pessimism. Cosmic evolution might be accountable for both good and evil, but knowledge of it provided no better reason for choice of the good than did earlier speculation. The cosmic process was not only non-moral but immoral; goodness did not lead to success in it, and laws and moral precepts could only be addressed to the curbing of it.

In a sense these conclusions of Huxley seemed to lead to absolute pessimism, but he offered some mitigating considerations. Society remains subject to the cosmic process, but the less as civilisation advances and ethical man is the more ready to combat it. The history of civilisation shows that we have some hope of this, for "when physiology, psychology, ethics, and political science, now befogged by crude antic.i.p.ations and futile a.n.a.logies, have emerged from their childhood, they may work as much change on human affairs as the earlier-ripened physical sciences wrought on material progress." And so, remembering that the evil cosmic nature in us has the foothold of millions of years, and never hoping to abandon sorrow and pain, we may yet, in the manhood of our race, accept our destiny, and, with clear and steady eyes, address ourselves to the task of living, that we and others may live better.

These gloomy views come from Huxley with such weight and authority that even in a sketch of his life and opinions it may be noticed that they do not seem necessary deductions from the evolutionary conception of the world. The first count adduced against the cosmic process is its connection with suffering. It may be doubted, so far as the animal world is concerned, if Huxley has not exaggerated the gravity of this.

The two greatest contributors to the modern conception of evolution are not in agreement with him. Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:

"On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of death and reproduction--and without those there could have been no progressive development of the animal world--and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater balance of happiness could have been secured."

This view was evidently that also of Darwin himself, who thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence: "When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." As for man himself, though it be true that in him the consummation of pain is reached, still this is no isolated fact of far-reaching ethical importance. It is in direct dependence on the increased physical and mental development of man, and these are equally necessary for and equally susceptible to increased pleasure and increased happiness. It is not necessary to regard the cosmic process as evil. Even when man, in various ages, had elaborated the conception of abstract goodness, and had endeavoured to make his justice a doling out of reward and punishment according to merit, it was not inevitable to bring in a verdict of guilty against the Cosmos.

It is quite true that, in all the ages, man has seen the sun shine on the unjust as on the just. But it is an easy reflection that the world could not turn round on individual merit, and if few are so guilty as to deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, still fewer deserve some of the simpler and more common joys of life. The conception that was implicit in the disciplines of the older philosophies is still open to the philosophy of evolution. Behind it, as behind the "self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma,"

the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the _apatheia_ of the Stoics, there may lie a recognition of the worthlessness of the individual: an equable acceptation of one's self as part of a process: a triumph of intelligence over selfishness. Finally, behind the sharp division made between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of the oldest and most enduring fallacies of the world, a fallacy that Huxley himself spent a great part of his intellectual life in discovering and routing. The fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something separate and apart from man, as something through which he, however briefly, pa.s.ses. Thus Omar sang:

"Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.

"With them the seed of wisdom did I sow, And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow; And this was all the Harvest that I reaped-- 'I came like Water, and like Wind I go.'