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OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
CaIINo.U9.9/C75D Accession No. 8 94
Author Conklin E.G.,
Tide Direction of human evolution
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THE DIRECTION
OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
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THE DIRECTION OF
HUMAN EVOLUTION
BY
EDWIN GRANT CONKJJN
PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN PRINCETolTuNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF "HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT IN DEVELOPMENT OF MEN," ETC.
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW
TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY
Copyright, 1991, by Charles Scrtbner's Sons
for the United States of America
Printed by The Scrlbner Press
New York, U. S. A.
PREFACE
THE lectures which constitute this volume were
given at the University of North Carolina in May,
1920, under the terms of the "John Calvin McNair
Lectureship on the mutual bearings of science and
religion upon each other." One or two of them
were also delivered at Northwestern University,
Mt. Holyoke College, Western University, and the
University of Texas.
The topic chosen for this series is one in which
the bearings of science upon religion are most vital,
namely, the origin and destiny of the human race.
I shall attempt to present certain conclusions of
science regarding the evolution of man, and shall
venture to draw from these conclusions certain in-
ferences with regard to the future of the human
race, but I have no desire to force others to accept
these conclusions or inferences.
The spirit of science is freedom to seek and to
find truth, freedom to hold and to teach any view
for which there is rational evidence, recognition
that natural knowledge is incomplete and subject
to revision, and that there is no legitimate com-
pulsion in science except the compulsion of evidence.
The method of science is to proceed from observa-
vi PREFACE
tions to tentative explanations which are then
tested by further observations and experiments,
thus reaching general explanations or theories.
Scientific theories are not mere guesses but are
based upon careful, detailed observations, but
where time and space forbid entering into details,
as is true in these lectures, only general conclusions
can be given. On the other hand the philosophical
and religious deductions which are based upon sci-
entific theories must necessarily be still more ten-
tative, and it is hoped that the reader will take this
for granted even though it is not always expressly
stated.
The aim of real science, as well as of true religion,
is to know the truth, confident that even unwel-
come truth is better than cherished error, that the
welfare of the human race depends upon the exten-
sion and diffusion of knowledge among men, and
that truth alone can make us free.
It is not my intention to argue the truth of the
general theory of organic evolution; the day for
this is passed. Evolution in the widest sense is
accepted by most men of science, and the evidences
for it need not be recalled here. Nor do I propose
to present in detail the evidences for the evolution
of man; this has been done in many other places
and need not be repeated here. My purpose is
rather to consider the course of past evolution only
in so far as it bears upon the present and to apply
PREFACE vii
the principles which have guided evolution in the
past to the present and future evolution of the
human race. In doing this I hope not only to deal
with a phase of the subject which will be more
immediately practical and profitable than a mere
consideration of past evolution would be, but which
also may avoid many controversies, for whatever
our views may be as to the past evolution of man
there is general belief in the present and future de-
velopment and evolution of the human race.
Finally, in considering the bearings of evolution
upon government and religion, I realize that I am
dealing with subjects which are generally regarded
as quite outside the field of biology. However, I
am convinced that nothing which concerns man is
wholly foreign to the fundamental principles of
life and evolution, and that the future progress of
mankind depends upon a rational application of
the principles of science to all human affairs.
Everywhere intellectual classes are breaking away
from old traditions; everywhere old faiths are be-
ing critically examined; everywhere evidence is de-
manded in place of authority, and the times call
for a restatement of the reasons for the faith that
is in us.
The recent cataclysm which has swept over the
world, the perils of civilization, the threatenings of
revolution and Bolshevism and the wide-spread re-
crudescence of emotionalism, irrationalism, and
viii PREFACE
selfishness have caused all thoughtful people to look
anxiously to the future. Many persons believe
that our civilization, like other civilizations of the
past, is showing signs of degeneration and decay,
that throughout the world the less intelligent and
more selfish elements of society are coming to con-
trol government, industry, and education, while
the best elements are dying out or are losing con-
trol. Others look forward with alarm to increasing
conflicts between the races of mankind, to a " Rising
Tide of Color in the Struggle for World Suprem-
acy,"* and to elimination of the finest types in
"The Passing of the Great Race." f
Chesterton says that the World War put a stop
to all our talk about human evolution, but this is
certainly not true. Never before have the prob-
lems of the future evolution of man, whether pro-
gressive or retrogressive, been so insistent and ab-
sorbing, and never before has it been so important
for men to get a comprehensive and steady view of
human evolution and of human destiny.
Certain portions or abstracts of these lectures
have been printed in Princeton University Lectures,
Scribner's Magazine, the Yale Review, and the
Methodist Church Congress Series. I am indebted
to these publications for permission to rewrite anft
enlarge these portions for this volume. I wish also
*Stoddard, Lothrop, New York, 1920.
t Grant, Madison, New York, 1918.
PREFACE ix
to express my obligations to Dr. J. H. McGregor
of Columbia University for the photograph of his
restorations of primitive men, which is reproduced in
the frontispiece, and to some of my colleagues for
friendly advice and criticism.
E. G. C.
CONTENTS
I. PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES OF HUMAN
EVOLUTION
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 3
A. THE LAW OF CONTINUITY 7
B. THE PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION ... 9
1. EVOLUTION IS TRANS-FORMATION AND
NOT NEW-FORMATION 9
2. EVOLUTION IS TRANSFORMATION OF
GERMPLASM AND NOT OF DEVELOPED
BODIES OF ANIMALS OR PLANTS . . IO
3. INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT ON EVO-
LUTION II
INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHAR-
ACTERS 13
4. SOCIAL INHERITANCE 14
C. THE RESULTS OF EVOLUTION .... 15
1. DIVERSITY 15
2. ADAPTATION l6
3. PROGRESS l6
(a) THE PATHS OF PROGRESS .... l8
(6) PROGRESS MOST RAPID AT FIRST . 19
II. THE PAST EVOLUTION OF MAN 25
III. MODERN RACES OF MEN 31
IV. THE PEOPLING OF THE EARTH 36
V. HYBRIDIZATION OF RACES 47
xi
xii CONTENTS
PAOt
VI. PRESENT AND FUTURE EVOLUTION OF MAN . 54
A. PHYSICAL EVOLUTION 54
EUGENICS 56
B. INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION 65
C. SOCIAL EVOLUTION 69
D. MAN'S CONQUEST OF NATURE .... 77
VII. WILL THERE BE A HIGHER ANIMAL THAN MAN ? 79
II. EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
I. THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY . 85
A. PHYSICAL, INTELLECTUAL, SOCIAL EVOLU-
TION NOT ANTAGONISTIC 85
B. SOCIAL PROGRESS MEANS GREATER SPE-
CIALIZATION AND CO-OPERATION . . 88
C. SOCIETY FOUNDED ON INSTINCTS ... ,90
II. PROGRESS IN HUMAN HISTORY 95
III. THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF DEMOCRACY . . 100
IV. PERSONAL LIBERTY vs. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 112
V. DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY vs. HEREDITARY IN-
EQUALITY 127
VI. UNIVERSAL FRATERNITY vs. NATIONAL AND
CLASS ANTAGONISMS 134
CONCLUSION 155
III. EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
I. THE NATURE OF RELIGION 161
A. COSMIC MYSTERIES 162
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
B. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 163
C. THE INNER CONFLICT 165
D. THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION . . . . 166
II. THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 169
III. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THEOLOGY AND SCI-
ENCE 178
IV. NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL .... 185
A. POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS OF NATURE
AND THE SUPERNATURAL . 186
B. SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTION OF LAW ... 193
C. SUPERNATURALISM IN RELIGION ... 197
V. EVOLUTION vs. CREATION 202
VI. EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLICAL ACCOUNT . . 206
VII. Is EVOLUTION ATHEISTIC? 209
VIII. EVOLUTION AND THE DOCERINE OF DESIGN . 218
IX. THE NATURE OF MAN 230
X. THE RELIGION OF EVOLUTION 237
A. PROGRESS THROUGH STRUGGLE .... 237
B. ETHNOCENTRIC RATHER THAN EGOCENTRIC 240
C. THE OUTCOME OF EVOLUTION .... 245
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES OF
HUMAN EVOLUTION
INTRODUCTION
UNTIL about fifty years ago it was generally be-
lieved, even by scientists, that man had been re-
cently and miiaculously created, and that he stood
apart from the rest of nature in solitary grandeur.
It was thought that the whole past history of man
and even of the earth and stellar universe had been
a very brief one, dating back only to about 4,000
years B. C., or approximately 200 human genera-
tions, and many persons confidently expected that
the future would be even shorter. It is an inter-
esting fact that until very recent times the insta-
bility of nature and its approaching end were
deeply impressed on most minds. Prophets looked
forward to a speedy end of the world; poems were
written on "The Last Man"; various sects pre-
pared their ascension robes and waited for the
comet to strike the earth or the eternal trumpet to
sound; and even those who did not prepare often
believed and trembled.
What a revolution has occurred in our concep-
tion of man and nature during the past few years !
Science has taught us something of the wonderful
stability of nature, something of the continuity
and eternity of natural processes, something of the
3
4 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
universality of natural law, something of the im-
mensity of time and space. There is no longer
any doubt among scientists that man is descended
from animal ancestors. There is no longer any
serious question among leading biologists and an-
thropologists that not only the body, but also the
mind and society of man are the products of evo-
lution. For a time there was a tendency to admit
the truth of evolution so far as man's body was
concerned, but to deny it in respect to his mind
and society. But this position was satisfactory
to no one. Neither the evolutionist nor the special
creationist could be satisfied with such a divided
origin for man, and more recent work on the psy-
chology and society of different races of men and
of animals below man has shown the same sort of
evidence for the evolution of human intellect and
society as for the evolution of the body. Man, then,
in his entirety is regarded by science as the product
of evolution. His actual origin goes back not to
Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, 6,000
years ago, but to more primitive races of men, and
then to prehuman ancestors, and in the end to
the earliest forms of life upon the earth. Between
us and these earliest forms there has been an un-
broken line of descent, an uninterrupted stream
of life through all the ages.
And this enormously long past history leads us
to believe that the future will be equally long. It
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 5
has been customary to look upon evolution as a
process which flourished mightily "in the dark
backward and abysm of time" but which has prac-
tically come to an end to-day. But evolution looks
forward as well as backward. The eternal laws of
nature will not cease to operate to-day or to-morrow.
We are creatures of a day; our lives are mere points
in the great curve of evolution; what changes the
future may have in store for the human race no man
can clearly foresee. And yet one who stands on
the shore and sees the curve of the sky and sea can,
in imagination, extend this arc until it circles the
globe, and he feels the earth beneath him rolling
through space. From a few observations an astron-
omer can calculate the whole orbit of a comet and
predict when it will return, perhaps hundreds or
thousands of years hence. And so, although we
catch but glimpses of great processes which come
out of eternity and go into eternity, we can project
the great principles of past evolution into the future
and venture upon a scientific prophecy of "What
mankind shall be."
It was the peculiar ability of Darwin to see
nature in four dimensions length, breadth, depth,
and duration. He observed the activities of earth-
worms for a season, and then calculated the agri-
cultural and geological importance of worms acting
through many years. He observed the minor varia-
tions of animals and plants, and then saw the evo-
6 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
lutionary significance of such changes when ex-
tended throughout geological time. He saw the
great destruction of weak and ill-adapted plants
and animals each year, and projecting this process
backward through the ages found a natural ex-
planation for the wonderful fitness of organisms.
One who stands on the brink of the Grand Canon
and reflects on the duration of time necessary for
a stream of water to have cut this vast chasm in
the solid rock, and then thinks of the still longer
time during which these rocks were being laid down
as sediments beneath the sea, has a measuring-rod
which may be used in estimating the duration of
the evolutionary process. One who views man,
not as the creation of a few years ago, but as the
product of vast series of prehistoric ages such a
one only can take the long view with regard to the
human race, not only as to the past but also as
to the future.
There is increased breadth of view and accuracy
of judgment and increased confidence and satis-
faction in the long view of the human race as con-
trasted with the short view. One who has in mind
the whole course of evolution and of human his-
tory will not be deceived into thinking that local
eddies and back currents are the main stream.
One who recalls what the human race has come up
from will not yield to despair over the present
crises of civilization. Even the selfishness, stu-
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 7
pidity, and irrationality of men will not cause him
to forget the advances of the past nor to lose faith
in the future. The long view of human history
is not only the sane and rational one, but it is also
the hopeful view.
It is often said that science deals only with the
past and present and leaves the future to prophets
and seers. This is true with regard to many de-
tails the causes of which are numerous and com-
plex. But on the other hand it is possible to pre-
dict general tendencies and phenomena which will
result from fundamental principles and causes.
The details of the future evolution of man no one
can predict, but the outcome of the general prin-
ciples of evolution may be predicted, for we have
confidence that these principles are constant and
that they will continue to operate in the future as
in the past. What are these principles?
A. THE LAW OF CONTINUITY
"Pour juger de ce qui est arrive, et m&me de ce qui
arrivera, nous n'avons qu'i examiner ce qui arrive" (Buf-
fon, "Theorie de la Terre.")
"To understand what has happened, and even
what will happen, we have only to examine what is
happening." This is what has been called the
"Law of Continuity " or more accurately the
"Doctrine of Uniformity," namely, the belief that
nature is uniform and her processes continuous, that
8 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
the laws of cause and effect, of gravity, of conser-
vation of matter and energy, of thermodynamics,
chemical affinity, life and death, heredity, develop-
ment, and evolution are the same yesterday, to-day,
and forever. The astronomer, physicist, and chem-
ist believe that laws of gravity, light, electricity,
and the combinations and dissociations of chemical
elements are the same to-day as when the "morn-
ing stars first sang together." The biologist be-
lieves that the animals which lived and reproduced
on the shores of the Paleozoic seas had protoplasm
and cells, nuclei and chromosomes, and that their
nutrition, reproduction, embryonic development,
senescence, and death were essentially the same as
in the animals we now study at our marine labora-
tories; that the Mendelian laws of inheritance, varia-
tion, and evolution applied to the earliest living
things as well as to the latest. All science is based
upon the fundamental belief that in natural laws
"there is neither variableness nor shadow of turn-
ing." Variableness in events (not in laws), and
even what we call chance, are not capricious but
are themselves governed by law; they are merely
the results of new combinations of existing factors
or causes. We have applied this principle of con-
tinuity and uniformity to the past evolution of the
universe, to the stars, solar system, and earth, to
the evolution of animals and plants, and even of
man; and in the light of what is happening now
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 9
have been able to judge what has happened in the
past. And where the factors involved are not too
numerous we can apply this principle to the future
and determine what will happen in time to come;
and, even where it is not possible to predict with
certainty particular events because of the com-
plexity of the factors involved, it is yet possible
to determine future tendencies and oossibilities.
B. THE PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION
i. Evolution Is Trans-formation and Not New-
formation
Evolution consists in new combinations of the
elements of which organisms are composed and not
in the formation de now of such elements. Nowhere
in nature, neither in the living nor in the lifeless
world, is there such a thing as creation out of
nothing. Every new thing is formed by new com-
binations of things already present. In chemistry
and physics these are the atoms or the electrons of
which the atoms are composed; in biology they are
the organs, cells, chromosomes, the hereditary char-
acters, inheritance units, or the molecules of which
such units are composed. Evolution does not con-
sist in the creation de novo of molecules, units, char-
acters, organs, or functions, but rather in new com-
binations of these.
At the same time it must be recognized that new
combinations give rise to new qualities. When
io PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
hydrogen and oxygen combine they produce some-
thing which is different from either, and when differ-
ent hereditary units combine they produce char-
acters unlike those of the parents; even in the forma-
tion of new hereditary units, or what are now called
mutations, we have only new combinations of the
elements of which such units are composed. This
formation of new qualities as the result of new
combinations of the same old elements may be
called, following Bergson, " creative evolution,"
but it is important to remember that it does not
differ essentially from the similar phenomenon in
chemistry and physics which is known as "creative
synthesis," and that it results merely from new com-
binations, that it is transformation and not new-
formation.
2. Evolution Is Transformation of Germplasm and
Not of Developed Bodies of Animals or Plants
The only living bond between successive genera-
tions is found in the germ cells, which extend back
from us without a break to our earliest progenitors,
and any evolutionary changes which are to trans-
form races or species must take place in these
germ cells. The body may undergo great changes
as the result of environment, use or disuse, or other
causes, but the body is mortal it develops and
dies in each generation whereas the germ cells
are, potentially at least, immortal. Consequently
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES n
changes in heredity are due to changes in the
immortal germplasm rather than in mortal bodies;
and evolution, which is based on changes in hered-
ity, consists in the evolution of germplasm rather
than of developed organisms.
In spite of much controversy, due largely to lack
of clear thinking, it is now practically certain that
characters acquired by the mortal body are not
inherited; that is, are not transmitted to the germ-
plasm. Evolutionary changes are not first wrought
in developed bodies but in germplasm.
3. Influence of Environment on Evolution
All theories as to the causes of evolution agree
in ascribing more or less importance to the influ-
ence of environment. Lamarckism maintains that
changes in individuals are caused directly by
changes in environment, and that these individual
changes are inherited and thus bring about racial
changes. Darwinism teaches that " variations of
every sort are caused by changed conditions of
life/' but that those which are injurious are quickly
eliminated while only those which are beneficial,
that is, well adapted to environment, persist and
constitute the building materials of evolution.
The mutation theory of de Vries teaches that varia-
tions are of two distinct kinds: first, fluctuations
which are changes in the developed organism and
are not inherited; and second, mutations which are
12 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
changes in the germplasm and are inherited.
Fluctuations are caused chiefly if not entirely by
changes in environment, and while the causes of
mutations are not known with certainty it seems
most probable that they also are to be found
in environmental influences meaning by environ-
ment everything which surrounds the inheritance
units or genes of the germplasm. These mutations
appear without reference to whether they are valu-
able or injurious; as a matter of fact probably only
one out of a thousand is beneficial, but those which
are injurious are eliminated by the environment.
Consequently the direction of evolution has to a
certain extent been determined by the environ-
mental conditions.
In short, all modern theories of the causes of
evolution maintain that heritable variations are
probably caused by changes in environment, and
all evolutionists to-day believe that whether these
variations survive or are wiped out depends upon
their relation to environment. Environment thus
plays a very important part in evolution, and any
hypothesis that wholly discards or disregards this
factor can have no standing in science.
But, on the other hand, this does not justify the
opinion that environmental changes are the sole
causes of evolution. Undoubtedly the organism
that is acted upon is as important as the environ-
ment which acts upon it. Evolution is one of the
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 13
responses of the germplasm to environmental stim-
uli, and the character of the response is deter-
mined in large part by the constitution of the germ-
plasm rather than by the stimulus. Thus both the
organism and its surroundings, its hereditary con-
stitution and its environment, are concerned in
evolution, as well as in development or any other
vital activity. It is certain that the outer environ-
ment may act directly upon germ cells, or indirectly
through the inner environment of the body. But
this does not mean that germ cells react to environ-
ment in identically the same way that body cells
do; indeed every kind of cell responds to environ-
mental stimuli in its own peculiar way muscle
cells in one way, nerve cells in another, gland cells
in still another, and it is probable that different
kinds of germ cells, or even the same kinds at dif-
ferent stages in their development, respond to the
same environment in different ways.
Inheritance of Acquired Characters. But, assum-
ing that the hereditary constitution of the germ
cells may sometimes be changed by environmental
influences, there is no argument in this for the " in-
heritance of acquired characters/' For both ver-
bally and historically this expression means that
changes in body cells produced by environmental
influences are transmitted through the germ cells
to the body cells of the next generation; and ana-
lyzing this process further it would imply that par-
14 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
tides or units of the germplasm must react to
environmental changes in exactly the same way as
organs or parts of the body do. In short, "in-
heritance of acquired characters " implies that the
germ is the body in miniature, and this is certainly
not true.
Furthermore, it is known as a matter of fact
that acquired characters are not usually, if ever,
inherited. Environment, training, education may
greatly modify the glands, muscles, and nerves,
but they do not change the germplasm so as to
produce these identical modifications in the next
generation. The hope of permanently improving
the human race, or any other species, in this man-
ner can only lead to disappointment and failure.
4. Social Inheritance
At the same time it must be remembered that
man transmits to his descendants not only a par-
ticular germplasm, consisting of hereditary units,
which determine his bodily qualities and mental
capacities, but he also hands down through lan-
guage, education, and customs, and not through
the germplasm, his own personal acquirements,
experiences, and possessions. This may be called
" Social Inheritance," though it is a totally different
thing from "Biological or Germinal Inheritance."
In this sense we have inherited from our parents
language, property, customs, laws, institutions.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 15
They are no part of our germplasm, nor even of our
bone and sinew and brain, but rather of our envi-
ronment. Because of this social inheritance society
may advance from age to age, each succeeding gen-
eration starting where the preceding one ended, as
in a relay race whereas in our germinal inheri-
tance each generation begins where the previous
one began, namely from an egg-cell, and the whole
course of development must be repeated in each
generation.
C. THE RESULTS OF EVOLUTION
In the course of evolution organisms have moved
forward, backward, and sidewise, or rather they
have spread as the branches of a tree, some of
them merely diverging at the same level of organi-
zation, others growing upward, and still others
downward. The results of evolution may be sum-
marized in three words: Diversity, Adaptation,
Progress.
i. Diversity
Diversity is seen in the innumerable variations,
mutations, and species of the living world. Most
of these are no more complex or perfect than the
stocks from which they have sprung, and some of
them are degenerate descendants of more perfect
ancestors. Diversity, in short, is mere change,
whether progressive or retrogressive, whether use-
ful, indifferent, or harmful.
1 6 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
2. Adaptation
Adaptive evolution is increasing perfection of ad-
justment to conditions of life. The only scientific
explanation of such adjustment or fitness is Dar-
win's principle of natural selection of the fit and
elimination of the unfit, and it is eloquent testimony
to the greatness of Darwin that more and more this
great principle is being recognized as the only
mechanistic explanation of adaptation. Whether
natural selection is a complete explanation of all
adaptation may be doubted, but at least it is one
of the most important causes of adaptive evolution.
3. Progress
Progressive evolution is the advance in organiza-
tion from the simplest to the most complex or-
ganisms, from amoeba to man. Biological progress
means increasing complexity of structures and func-
tions, increasing specialization and co-operation of
the parts and activities of organisms, and human
progress, whether physical, intellectual, or social,
means no more and no less than this.
It is often assumed that there are no necessary
limits to progress in any line, and that the past
course of evolution shows that man came from
primordial protoplasm and will go on to endless
growth and glory. But as a matter of fact the past
course of evolution teaches that the limits of prog-
ress are fixed by its very nature. No single animal
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 17
or plant, however complex it may be, can combine
within itself all the complexities of all organisms.
Increasing specialization means increasing limita-
tions in certain directions in order to advance in
others. If a creature have wings it cannot also
have hands (except in art where angels are given
an extra pair of appendages and hair and feathers
are mixed regardless of zoological classification) ; if
its limbs are differentiated for running they cannot
also be specialized for swimming; if it have enor-
mous strength it cannot also have great delicacy
of movement. Thus while certain animals are
specialized in one direction, and others in another,
no animal can be differentiated in all directions.
Furthermore, increasing specialization leads to
lack of adaptability; peculiar fitness for any special
condition of life means unfitness for other and differ-
ent conditions. When differentiations in any one
direction go so far that they unfit the organism for
any condition of life except a single and special
one, the chances for survival are greatly reduced,
and sooner or later this highly differentiated or-
ganism becomes extinct or returns to a more gen-
eralized type.
Paleontology is, in the main, the science of or-
ganisms that were too highly differentiated to ad-
just themselves to the new conditions that came
upon them and which therefore became extinct.
The death of species, like the death of individuals,
i8 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
is the price that is paid for differentiation. One-
celled organisms and all germ cells are potentially
immortal, but the highly differentiated bodies of
animals and plants and their highly differentiated
muscle, nerve, and tissue cells are mortal, probably
because they are too highly specialized to adjust
themselves to all the changing conditions of exist-
ence.
Similarly species that are not highly specialized
are highly adaptable, and have great powers of
survival, while those that are highly specialized
have little adaptability, and consequently are more
likely to become extinct. For this reason new
paths of evolution usually start from generalized
rather than from highly specialized types.
(a). The Paths of Progress. Millions of diver-
sities exist among organisms, and they are appear-
ing continually; thousands of adaptations have
arisen during the course of evolution and are still
arising; but different lines of progress have been
relatively few. The most important paths of prog-
ress throughout all the past ages have been in the
direction of
(1) Increasing bodily complexity, or the multipli-
cation and differentiation of cells, tissues, organs,
and systems;
(2) Increasing intelligence, or the capacity of
profiting by experience, which comes with increas-
ing organization of the nervous system;
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 19
(3) Increasing social organization, or the differ-
entiation and integrations of individuals or persons,
whether among ants, bees, or men.
(6). Progress Most Rapid at First. In all these
paths of evolution progress is most rapid at first,
and it then slows down until it stops. It may be
compared to a curve which rises rapidly at first,
and then approaches more and more to a straight
line. Or better still, it may be compared to a
flow of lava which rushes forward while it is at
white heat and fresh out of the crater, but goes
more and more slowly as it cools until it stops al-
together; if the central stream remains fluid (or
the organism remains labile and relatively undiffer-
entiated) it may burst out and again flow rapidly
in one direction or another until it again cools and
stops.
The rate of evolution has not been uniform
throughout the past. Apparently there have been
periodic advances or waves of evolution. De Vries
thinks that there have been periods of mutation
alternating with periods of stability in the history
of species. Paleontologists have generally attrib-
uted these evolutionary waves to changes in envi-
ronment, and they call attention to the evidence
that the periods of most rapid human evolution
coincided with the great climatic changes during
the four successive glacial epochs and the inter-
glacial periods.
20 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
(i) Bodily Complexity. Probably the furthest
possible limits of progressive evolution have already
been reached in all well-tried lines of progress.
Further progress must be made in new lines if at
all, and from generalized rather than from highly
specialized types.
One-celled organisms reached their utmost limits
of complexity millions of years ago; since then they
have shown many diversities, many adaptations,
but little if any progress.
Also many-celled animals and plants long ago
reached the limits of their possible progress in
almost every line. Multiplication of cells, tissues,
organs, systems, metameres, and zooids enormously
increased the possibilities of specialization within
each of these larger units of organization, but for
millions of years there has been little further prog-
ress in this direction of multiplicity and com-
plexity. Only about fourteen times in the whole
history of life upon the earth have new animal
phyla appeared, and many of these were mere
blind alleys which led nowhere, not even to
many species; there have been no new phyla since
fishes appeared in the Silurian age, no new classes
since mammals appeared in the Triassic and birds
in the Jurassic. Each of these classes of Verte-
brates reached its maximum of complexity in the
ages immediately following its first appearance,
and thereafter it maintained only this level or more
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 21
frequently underwent a decline. The amphibians
which first appeared in the Carboniferous reached
their greatest complexity in the Permian. The
reptiles which first appeared in the Permian reached
their climax in the Mesozoic. The mammals which
appeared in the Triassic reached their greatest de-
velopment in the Quaternary.
What is true of great classes of organisms such
as those named is equally true of families, genera,
and species. One need only recall the paleon-
tological history of dinosaurs, elephants, camels,
etc., to realize that, measured by geological time,
organisms rather quickly reach the limits of their
progress in any particular line. Diversities may
continue to appear in all these types. Many new
species have evolved and are still appearing, there
have been diversifications and adaptation almost
without limit, but progress in the sense of increas-
ing complexity of organization has practically come
to an end.
(2) Animal Societies. There are many grades
of individuality in the living world from the visible
and even the invisible parts of cells to whole cells,
cell aggregates, tissues, organs, systems, persons,
compound animals, and finally colonies and states.
There are many grades of organization from the
bacterium to the vertebrate, from the germ cell to
the man. Animal societies are the highest grade
of organization which has yet appeared on earth.
22 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
In such societies the specialization and co-operation
of persons make possible a higher degree of organ-
ization than has ever appeared before.
The evolution of animal societies may be traced
from a condition in which every individual is much
like every other one, and the bond of connection
between them is very slight, up to societies of ants,
bees, and termites, in which the specialization and
co-operation of individuals is extraordinarily de-
veloped.
Already differentiation among ants and termites
has gone so far that in the most complex colonies
the three principal functions of life, namely nutri-
tion, reproduction, and defense, are no longer found
in the same individuals; "workers" are unable to
reproduce or to defend the colony, males and fe-
males are unable to get food or to defend themselves,
" soldiers" are unable to reproduce or even to feed
themselves. At the same time co-operation within
the colony is practically perfect. It is difficult to
imagine how differentiation and integration can
go farther than this, and unless it does go farther
progress in this direction has come to an end.
(3) Intellectual evolution is the last, and, from
the human point of view, the most important path
of progress which has ever been discovered by or-
ganisms. In lower animals intellect is either lack-
ing or is but little developed, and behavior is guided
entirely by rigid instincts; in higher animals it is
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 23
more fully developed, but instinct is still the rule
of life; in man only has intellect become to a cer-
tain extent the master of instinct, so that he can-
not only regulate his conduct in the light of experi-
ence but can to a certain extent forecast the future
and prepare for it.
Here, as in the case of physical and social evolu-
tion, the factors or elements out of which the new
product, intellect, is built are present in the lowest
and simplest forms of life, but it is only by the in-
creasing differentiation and integration of these
elements that progress is achieved. The elements
out of which the psychic faculties of man have been
developed are present in all organisms, even in
germ cells, in the form of sensitivity, tropisms, re-
flexes, organic memory, "trial and error/' and a
few other properties; in more complex animals
these take the form of special senses, instincts,
emotions, associative memory; in the highest ani-
mals, and especially in man, they blossom forth
as intelligence, reason, will, and consciousness.
Many stages of this development may be seen in
various animals below man, and also in the devel-
opment of the human personality from the germ
cells.*
There is no evidence that intellectual progress,
as distinguished from mere diversity, is still going
on among animals, and that they will ultimately
*See Conklin, "Heredity and Environment/- 1920, pp. 32-56.
24 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
graduate into man's class. For thousands of years
man has endeavored to improve by selective breed-
ing the intelligence of certain animals, especially
of dogs and horses; undoubtedly much improvfr-
ment has been made, but in intelligence, as in other
qualities, a limit to improvement is sooner or later
reached beyond which it is not possible to go.
In bodily complexity, social organization, and
intellectual capacity progressive evolution has vir-
tually come to an end among organisms below man;
further progress, if it occurs, must be in new paths
and from generalized rather than from highly spe-
cialized types. Has progressive evolution come to
an end in the case of man also?
II
THE PAST EVOLUTION OF MAN
SOLAR years, individual lives, and human genera-
tions are too brief to be used as an adequate measur-
ing-rod for the enormously long process of human
evolution. We generally count time from the
birth of Christ, and to us this seems a remote event.
But the birth of Christ is no more than midway
between our times and the earliest civilization in
Europe,* while the civilizations of Egypt and Meso-
potamia go back to a period at least 3,000 years
B. C. At this remote time there were in the val-
leys of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris great cities
and states, highly organized forms of society, and
a culture represented by some of the greatest monu-
ments of human history, highly developed agricul-
ture and industries, the use of metals and the re-
cording of laws, customs, wars, and even of scien-
tific observations in writings. Even one thousand
years earlier, at the date fixed upon by Archbishop
Usher for the creation of the world and of man, viz.,
4000 B.C., there were in these valleys great popula-
tions that had domesticated horses, donkeys, cattle,
sheep, goats, ducks, and geese; that were cultivating
barley, millet, wheat, and flax; that had through
* Crete.
25
26 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
long periods of time developed various improved
breeds and races of these animals and plants from
their originally wild stocks. They had begun the
smelting of ores and the use of copper implements;
there were skilled craftsmen in various industries;
they had a complicated system of writing and had
developed a calendar of twelve months of thirty
days each, with five feast days at the end of the
year, thus showing a remarkable knowledge of as-
tronomical time. Adam and Eve may well have
been civilized human beings, for, according to the
Usher chronology, they came only in the fulness of
time and of human populations, and after the be-
ginnings of civilization.
But back of this civilization lay long years of
barbarism and savagery, known as the neolithic
and the paleolithic ages. The records of the former
are found in various parts of the world in caves,
cliffs, and lake-dwellings, in skeletons from ceme-
teries, caves, and sedimentary deposits of lakes and
rivers, accompanied by bricks and pottery, beautiful
stone implements, ornaments of various kinds, and
carvings and paintings on walls and cliffs. While
it is difficult to date this neolithic age, the best evi-
dence indicates that around the Mediterranean it
goes b&ck to near the end of the last glacial epoch,
say approximately 10,000 years ago.
Back of this neolithic age lie the paleolithic ages
of savagery, the records of which are for the most
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 27
part stone implements and weapons; the latest of
these are of beautiful workmanship, while the
earliest are so crude that it is often difficult to de-
cide whether or not they are the work of man.
Along with these artifacts, skeletal remains have
been found which indicate that the men of the later
paleolithic ages were of the same species and had
the chief physical characteristics of the present
human species, Homo sapiens, and the stratigraph-
ical evidences indicate that in Europe the existing
species of man goes back at least 20,000 to 30,000
years.*
In the still more remote past occur skeletal re-
mains of other and more primitive species of man.
Most of these are represented by one or at most a
few specimens, but one of the extinct species of
man, Homo neanderthalensis, is represented by at
least six skulls as well as other remains found in
various parts of western Europe from Gibraltar
to Germany. This Neanderthal type was dis-
tinctly more ape-like than the present species: he
had a low, retreating forehead, heavy supraorbital
ridges, protruding jaws and face, and retreating
chin. Rude flint implements associated with these
remains indicate that the Neanderthal man was
able at least to chip flint so as to produce weapons
and implements with sharp cutting edges. These
* On this subject see especially Henry Fairfield Osborn's " Men of
the Old Stone Age," New York, 1916.
28 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
remains are associated with the skeletons of other
mammals, many of them now extinct, which charac-
terize the later Pleistocene of Europe, and the pre-
vailing opinion among geologists is that they be-
long to the period of the third or fourth glacial
epoch. It is obviously impossible to translate these
geological epochs into years with any degree of
certainty, but at a venture it may be said that the
Neanderthal race lived somewhere between 25,000
and 100,000 years ago. We do not know whether
the Neanderthal species evolved into modern man,
or whether he amalgamated with other types, or
whether he was exterminated by the existing species,
but in western Europe he appeared before the pres-
ent species and was finally completely replaced by
it.
Other types of man of a still more ape-like~form
are represented by a few skeletal remains in earlier
geological formations. One of the most important
of these fossils is the famous Heidelberg jaw, found
in 1907 near Heidelberg, Germany. It is unlike
any other human jaw in its unusual massiveness
and lack of a chin, and yet the teeth are distinctly
human in shape. There can be no reasonable
doubt that it represents a species of man still more
primitive and ape-like than the Neanderthal type,
and accordingly this species has been named Homo
heidelbergensis. This jaw was found at a depth of
seventy-nine feet below the surface, associated with
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 29
remains of many extinct mammals qf the first or
second interglacial period, and it therefore carries
the human record back to the middle or early
Pleistocene, possibly 250,000 years ago.
Finally the earliest type of man-like creature so
far discovered is the erect ape-man, Pithecanthropus
erectus, discovered by Dubois at Trinil, Java, in
1892. These remains consist of a skull cap, a tooth,
and a thigh-bone, and it is evident that they belong
to a type intermediate between man and the higher
apes that they are, in short, one of the long-
sought " missing links." The geological formation
in which these fossils were found includes many
extinct mammals of the late Pliocene or pre-glacial
period, possibly 500,000 years ago.
It is by no means certain that Pithecanthropus
and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal races stand
in the direct line of descent of modern man; for all
we know to the contrary they may be collateral
branches from the main human stem. But they
do represent the most primitive types of man so
far discovered.
Even at this early stage, half a million years
ago, the human line was already distinct from
those of the higher apes, although these lines were
then much closer together than at present, and the
actual period at which they come together is as-
sumed by Osborn to have been in the Oligocene
age, perhaps a million years earlier. If this opinion
30 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
is correct the line of man's descent has 'been dis-
tinct from that of his nearest living relatives, the
anthropoid apes, for an immensely long period of
time, perhaps one or two million years. The entire
Christian Era represents not more than i-5oth part
of the time since the Neanderthal man flourished,
not more than i-25oth of the time since Pithecan-
thropus, and probably not more than i-5ooth part
of the time since the human line split off from that
of the apes. The human race is very old as mea-
sured by our years and generations, and back of the
first appearance of human types lie unnumbered
millions of years during which evolution was mov-
ing on from the lowest forms of life to the highest
from amoeba to man.
Ill
MODERN RACES OF MAN
WHEN for a few centuries one group of human
beings became isolated from others there devel-
oped, as happens now with most animals and
plants, local varieties, mutants, and races, which
were probably peculiarly adapted to the local con-
ditions, owing to the struggle for existence and the
survival of the fit. Thus, for example, if the color
of primitive man was reddish or brownish, white or
yellow or black men may have arisen in different
regions, and at different times as mutants, or heredi-
tary varieties. These mutations would have per-
sisted if not positively injurious, and they would
have gradually replaced individuals of other colors
if they had been better adapted to local conditions.
Once a few mutant races were established, diversi-
fications of mankind proceeded not only by muta-
tion and natural selection but also by the process
of cross-breeding, and the very numerous subraces,
types, and breeds of mankind owe their origin in
considerable part to such mixtures of mutant races.
The principles of Mendelian inheritance show
that for every pair of contrasting characters in the
two parents, as for example straight or curly hair,
32 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
brown or blue eyes, there are two types of grand-
children showing these characters; when there are
five such pairs of contrasting characters in the
parents there may be (2) 6 or 32 types of grand-
children showing various combinations of these five
characters; when there are ten pairs of contrasting
characters there may be (2) 10 or 1,024 types of
grandchildren. Between different races there are
many more than ten unit differences, and thus with
a relatively small number of mutant characters an
enormous number of different combinations of the
characters is possible in the offspring. Subsequent
inbreeding of such a mixed race leads to the separa-
tion or segregation of particular types, having cer-
tain of these combinations, from other types having
other combinations. In this way, practically all of
our domestic animals and cultivated plants have
been produced, and probably many, if not all, exist-
ing branches of the human species owe their origin,
not only to mutations, but also to the mingling of
successive waves of migration and the amalgamation
of different mutant types, which had arisen and
multiplied in isolated regions. Since the early
radiations from the birthplace of the species there
have been many currents of migration running in
many directions which have led to a more or less
intimate commingling of different types, and where
such commingling was later followed by isolation,
races or subraces were formed. In this manner,
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 33
probably all the numerous existing branches of the
human species were established.
Three primary races of mankind are generally
recognized in the world to-day, namely the white,
yellow, and black races the brown and red races
being generally regarded as offshoots of one or
more of these primary races. In addition to these
primary races there are many subraces and breeds,
most if not all of them being of hybrid origin. In-
deed there are few if any types of mankind to-day
that are not, hybrids between races, subraces, or
breeds. Among these subraces are the light and
the dark whites, and several types of browns, reds,
yellows, and blacks. In each of these groups there
are innumerable varieties that run into one another
by insensible degrees, as would be expected in the
case of hybrids.
The question has often been raised whether the
primary races of mankind do not represent distinct
species. It is difficult, if not impossible, to define
the term " species" in a manner which will be uni-
versally acceptable, but in general biologists agree
that in the animal and plant world true species
differ in more respects and to a greater degree than
do the primary races of mankind. Furthermore,
true species do not generally produce fertile hybrids
when interbred, though there are many exceptions
to this rule, whereas all races of mankind produce
fertile hybrids when crossed. Therefore systema-
34 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
tists generally agree that there is at present but one
species of man, namely Homo sapiens, and that all
races and varieties have arisen in the first instance
from a common human stock.
Again the question is often asked: Which of these
races of mankind represents most nearly the orig-
inal ancestral stock, and which has departed farthest
from that stock. Comparison of any modern race
with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types shows
that all have changed, but probably the negroid
races more closely resemble the original stock than
the white or yellow races. The separation of these
primary races occurred long before the historic era.
In the period of the cave men of Europe, possibly
25,000 years ago, remains of two races have been
found, the Cro-Magnons, resembling more closely
the white or brown races of the present, and the
Grimaldi race with negroid characteristics. We do
not know when the white and yellow races first
became distinct, but this also was probably at a
very remote period.
The subraces and minor subdivisions of the hu-
man species have arisen much more recently, some
of them within the historic era, and many, if not
most of them, as the results of migration and hy-
bridization. Three branches of the white race in
Europe are generally recognized, namely the tall,
blond, Nordic race of northern Europe; the stocky,
dark, Alpine race, probably of Asiatic origin; and
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 35
the small, dark, Mediterranean race surrounding
the sea of that name, and probably extending east-
ward to India.*
The subdivisions of the other primary races as
well as the many hybrid types found in various
parts of the world cannot be considered here. But
emphasis must be placed upon the fact that the
evolution of these subraces was not due entirely
to divergent mutations of an originally common
stock, but also to recombination and hybridization
of groups already present, which probably arose in
the first instance as a result of mutation and diver-
gent evolution.
Furthermore it is probable that many charac-
teristics which have hitherto been regarded as
hereditary or racial may be due to environmental
causes; it is probable, for example, that stature,
long-headedness (dolicocephaly) or round-headed-
ness (brachycephaly), etc., may sometimes be caused
by higher or lower activity of the thyroid gland
and that this may be influenced by food, particu-
larly by the iodine intake.
* For a full discussion of these races see Madison Grant's "The
Passing of the Great Race," New York, 1918.
IV
THE PEOPLING OF THE EARTH
MAN has always been a wandering animal; he
is the most wide-ranging of all mammals. From
his earliest home, probably in the table-lands of
central Asia, successive waves of human migration
have flowed forth in all directions. The records
of these earliest wanderings are lost in the haze of
immense antiquity but we have reason to believe
that for at least a thousand centuries primitive
man wandered over vast regions of Asia, Europe,
and Africa. Long before the beginnings of recorded
history men had found and occupied every habita-
ble land on the globe with the possible exception
of a few distant oceanic islands. Everywhere the
"aborigines," who were found by white men in
their earliest explorations, were not the first inhabi-
tants, but were invaders who had driven out still
earlier peoples. When the Maoris first came to
New Zealand, they found an earlier race there, the
Morioris, whom they exterminated or drove out
to more inhospitable lands such as the Chatham
Islands; when the Australian "aborigines" first
came to that land they found it already occupied
36
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 37
by another race who retreated before them to
Tasmania;* the Polynesian race was preceded in
its occupancy of the Pacific Islands by an unknown
race which left great monolithic monuments, as in
Fiji and in Easter Island; the American Indians
were preceded by the "Mound Builders"; and
similarly in every part of the world it is difficult
to get back to the first human inhabitants. In
the thousands of centuries which separate the origin
of the earliest human types from the period of
written history, mankind had wandered over all
parts of the earth.
During this time the surface of the earth itself
suffered many changes; portions which are now
covered by seas were then dry lands; isolated
islands were then connected with continents; four
great ice ages separated by interglacial epochs,
each lasting for thousands of years, came and went;
large portions of the northern hemisphere were
at times as inhospitable as central Greenland is
to-day and again these regions were covered with
forests and luxuriant vegetation and inhabited
by strange, extinct animals; and throughout all
these changes in the earth's surface and in its
living inhabitants, primitive men discovered and
occupied practically every habitable portion of the
globe.
The total human population of the earth has
*Spcnccr, W. Baldwin. "Federal Handbook on Australia," 1914-
38 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
been estimated* to be about 1,700,000,000, distrib-
uted among the different races as follows:
White race about 550,000,000
Yellow race about 500,000,000
Brown race about 450,000,000
Black race about 150,000,000
Red race about 40,000,000
It should be noted that it is customary to count
persons of mixed white and colored blood as be-
longing wholly to the colored races, so that the
figures given above rather minimize the white
element in the population of the globe.
In general the growth of population is correlated
with the area occupied and with the agricultural
and industrial development of the people. Where
there is much crowding, populations are either
stationary or are growing slowly. Where there is
a rich and abundant area, the growth of popula-
tion is usually rapid. Tribes with antisocial or
nomadic instincts, such as American Indians,
Bedouins, and Gypsies are decreasing under the
pressure of population and are destined ultimately
to disappear, unless they adopt the habits of more
settled peoples.
In China the population is practically at a stand-
still. It is growing in Japan and overflowing into
other countries, but on the whole the yellow race
* Stoddard, Lothrop. "The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World Supremacy," New York, 1920, p. 6.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 39
is not increasing very rapidly in numbers. Fecun-
dity is high but so, also, is mortality. In spite of
the great area which it occupies the black race is
not increasing in numbers in Africa, whereas by
immigration and natural increase the white race
in that continent is growing rapidly. Even in the
United Stated the rate of increase of the blacks
is not equal to that of the whites, for although the
birth-rate is high, the death-rate is also high.
The white race with about one-third of the total
population of the globe occupies four-tenths of the
habitable land and has political control over nine-
tenths of it.* In the more densely populated
portions of Europe the population is approaching
a stationary condition, but in the wide areas of
America, Africa, and Australasia it is expanding
rapidly.
In spite of the occasional alarms which are
sounded with regard to " race-suicide " it is evident
that the white race is at present increasing more
rapidly than any of the other human races. This
is due not merely to the % larger area which it con-
trols, but also to its greater agricultural, industrial,
and scientific development. While the birth-rate
is falling everywhere, the death-rate is falling more
rapidly among whites than among other races.
How long this greater growth of the white race
may go on no one can foresee, but certainly we
* Stoddard, L., loe. cit.
40 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
may anticipate that it will continue until the rela-
tively unoccupied areas which it now controls are
much more densely populated. But in an indus-
trial age it is not so much land area as sources of
energy such as coal, oil, and water power that
count most. Where these are abundant, there
are the "seats of power." Some of these have
been rapidly exhausted in the white man's countries
and it is believed that great stores of them are
found in other lands, especially in China. This
undoubtedly betokens a great industrial develop-
ment in China in the near future and this in turn
will lead to a further increase of population in
that country.
Most of our "race problems" are of relatively
recent origin and are caused chiefly by the pressure
of population within certain centres and its over-
flow into other lands as well as by the importation
of cheap labor. The white man in particular has
forced himself on other races, and the pressure of
whites into the lands of colored races has gone
much farther than the reverse. Furthermore, the
white man's demand for cheap labor is chiefly re-
sponsible for the importation of colored races into
the lands of the whites and for the general mixing
up of all races of mankind. The present competi-
tion between races is a contest in the relative growth
of populations and in economic progress rather than
in military power.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 41
In all living things populations tend to increase
in geometrical ratio, while the limits of the habita-
ble globe remain fixed. Migration may for a time
relieve this pressure of overpopulation, but its
limits are soon reached. In the case of man the
control and utilization of natural resources has
greatly extended the possible limits of population,
but it is evident that these resources are not indefi-
nite in extent. The whole world must look for-
ward to a time, at no distant date, when the limits
of population will be reached everywhere.
In his "Principles of Economics" (8th edition,
page 1 80) Alfred Marshall says:
Taking the present population of the world at one and a
half thousand millions; and assuming that its present rate
of increase will continue (about 8 per 1,000 annually; see
Ravenstein's paper before the British Association in 1890),
we find that in less than 200 years it will amount to six thou-
sand millions, or at the rate of about 200 to the square mile
of fairly fertile land. (Ravenstein reckons 28 million square
miles of fairly fertile land, and 14 millions of poor grass-
lands. The first estimate is thought by many to be too high ;
but allowing for this, if the less fertile land be reckoned in
for what it is worth, the result will be about 30 million square
miles as assumed above.) Meanwhile there will probably
be great improvements in the arts of agriculture; and, if
so, the pressure of population on the means of subsistence
may be held in check for about 200 years, but not longer.
Pearl* has shown that the growth of popula-
tion in the United States may be represented very
* Pearl, R. Proceedings National Academy of Sciences , June, 1920.
42 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
accurately by a long /-shaped curve, in which our
present population of about 100 millions falls near
the middle point, and he predicts that "the maxi-
mum population which continental United States,
as now arealy limited, will ever have will be roughly
twice the present population." He estimates that
this maximum will be reached in about 180 years,
and that at that date " unless our food habits
radically change, or unless our agricultural pro-
duction radically increases, it will be necessary
to import nearly or quite one-half of the calories
necessary for that population."
This is a different story from that which we have
been accustomed to hear. No longer is it true that
" Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all a farm,"
and the time is not very far off only about six
human generations when the death-rate in this
country must equal the birth-rate, or our ddscen-
dants of that date must emigrate. And where will
they go? By that time other parts of the world
will be much more fully occupied, and other na-
tions may choose to be more careful for their future
than we have been for ours. And we thought we
had room enough for all the crowded peoples of the
earth for all time to come ! This country will then
have no immigration problem, but for hundreds of
years more our descendants will have the racial
problems bequeathed to them by us, in order that
we might "get rich quick" by importing cheap
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 43
foreign labor and by stripping our land of its natural
resources as rapidly as possible.
The dangers of overpopulation have been em-
phasized by many scientists since Malthus pub-
lished his famous essay on this subject. In general,
these warnings have been lightly regarded, owing
chiefly to the enormous advances of science in
making available natural resources. Many per-
sons seem to think that these advances will go on
indefinitely and that therefore populations can
increase indefinitely, but this is certainly not true !
"The population question," says Huxley, "is the
real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political
(Edipus has as yet found the answer. In view of
the ravages of the terrible monster, overmultipli-
cation, all other riddles sink into insignificance." *
Nature will, of course, solve this problem for
us if we do not solve it for ourselves. Apart
from migration there are two ways, and only two,
of preventing overpopulation by increasing the
death-rate or decreasing the birth-rate. In all
civilized countries the death-rate has been decreas-
ing during the past century, but if overcrowding
and underfeeding should occur the death-rate
will inevitably increase. In the older and more
populous portions of the world the birth-rate has
also been decreasing, especially during the past
* Huxley, T. H. "The Natural Inequalities of Men," Collected
Essays, New York, p. 328.
44 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
two or three generations. In the main this has
been due to voluntary causes, and in so far as it
represents an intelligent and ethical control of
reproduction, and not mere selfishness, it is to be
commended. Future ages may see a complete
reversal of the current legal aspects of birth-
control; in a densely populated globe, instead of
discouraging this and forbidding the diffusion of
knowledge regarding it, the privilege of having
children may be strictly limited. Hitherto evolu-
tionary progress has depended to a large extent
upon overpopulation, the struggle for existence
and the survival of the fittest. In rational and
moral human societies this kind of natural selec-
tion can never again be allowed to work as it has
done in the past, but possibly overpopulation may
bring about a rational solution of this problem
along the lines of eugenics and birth-control.
Stoddard has said that the great danger to the
white race in this struggle for supremacy is due to
the fact that the colored races can underline the
whites. But there is no evidence that the abso-
lute requirements of food and clothing differ in
different races. The basal metabolism as measured
in calories of food is not markedly greater for white
men than for yellow or black men living under
the same conditions. No doubt the standards of
living are at present much higher among white
than among colored races. But standards of liv-
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 45
ing depend chiefly upon intelligence and resources.
Within any and every race there are great individual
variations in the standards of living, and among
the intelligent and well-to-do of different races
these standards do not differ greatly. There are
few things which all types of mankind learn more
quickly and willingly than to adopt higher stand-
ards of living when they have the opportunity,
and we may be sure that this will apply to the
colored races as well as to the poorer types of whites.
One of the great dangers which confronts the
whole world is that standards of living, with de-
mands for luxuries and leisure, are increasing much
more rapidly than intelligence and social responsi-
bility.
In the long run, supremacy will pass in every
community, nation, or race to the more intelligent,
the more capable, the more ethical, rather than to
the best livers. It is only when high standards
of living spring from high standards of intelligence
and social ideals that they are not a menace rather
than a blessing. Mere love of luxury will sap our
civilization as it did that of ancient Greece and
Rome, and if it should affect the white race much
more than the colored races, then indeed should
we have cause to fear for white leadership in the
world.
After all, in this struggle of races and peoples,
there is reason to believe that success will ulti-
46 PATHS, AND POSSIBILITIES
mately rest with the intelligent, the capable, and
the ethical, and the attention of all who love their
race should be centred upon raising the standards
of heredity, of education, and of social ideals rather
than upon standards of living. I see no reason to
suppose that in these respects the white races will
fall below the colored ones. The greatest danger
which faces any superior race is that of amalgama-
tion with inferior stock and the consequent lowering
of inherited capacities.
HYBRIDIZATION OF RACES
EXISTING races have arisen by mutation and
hybridization, but they have been established by
the isolation of certain of these mutants or biotypes.
The present tendency to the breaking down of
isolation and the commingling of races is a reversal
of the processes by which those races were estab-
lished. If in the past "God made of one blood
all nations of men," it is certain that at present
there is being made from all nations one blood.
By the interbreeding of various races and breeds
there has come to be a complicated intermixture
of racial characters in almost every human stock,
and this process is going on to-day more rapidly
and extensively than ever before. Strictly speak-
ing, there are no "pure" lines in any human group.
If so-called "pure" English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch,
German, Russian, French, Spanish, or Italian
lines are traced back only a few generations they
are found to include many foreign strains, and this
is especially true of American families, even those
of "purest" blood.
By this commingling of different lines many
new combinations of characters are produced and
47
48 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
some of these combinations may be superior to
either parental type, while others may be inferior.
In the language of genetics all the offspring of
parents of different breeds or strains are "hy-
brids," though in common usage this term is ap-
plied only where the parents belong to different
species, subspecies, or races. Mongrels or hy-
brids are not always inferior to their parents nor
are these terms necessarily ones of reproach, as
popular usage would indicate. Bateson says that
most of the new varieties of cultivated plants are
the result of deliberate crossing. This is the proc-
ess which Burbank has followed with such wonder-
ful success in his experiments. Where two breeds
have certain qualities which are desirable and others
which are undesirable, it is often possible by cross-
ing them to get a few hybrids in which the good
qualities of both breeds are combined and the bad
ones eliminated. Many species of domesticated
animals and cultivated plants are of hybrid origin;
among these are probably dogs, cats, cattle, horses,
sheep, pigs, poultry; wheat, oats, rice, plums,
cherries, etc.
We are quite accustomed, and more or less
reconciled, to the intermingling of European races,
but the average white person, at least, is unable
to look upon the commingling of blood of the pri-
mary races of mankind without serious misgivings
as to its effect on the future of the species. Within
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 49
certain limits cross-breeding of animals and plants
seems to produce increased vigor,* and there is no
doubt that highly desirable combinations of the
characters of different breeds can thus be made.
It is generally believed by Englishmen that the
Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Norman-French,
Scotch-Irish combinations were very good ones,
and Americans would point to the good results of
the crossing of English, Scotch, Irish, French,
Dutch, German, and Scandinavian stocks.
But it is a general belief that the crossing of
distinct species or subspecies does not lead to
improvement, and it is said that the actual results
of the crossing of white, black, and red races in
South America, Mexico, and the West Indies, or
of brown, yellow, and white races in Polynesia,
has not produced a type superior to the best of
those that entered into the combination. Stoddard
(p. 116) says that "Most informed observers agree
that the mixed-bloods of Latin America are dis-
tinctly inferior to the whites. This applies to
both mestizos and mulattoes, albeit the mestizo
(the cross between white and Indian) seems less
inferior than the mulatto the cross between
white and black. As for the zambo, the Indian-
negro cross, everybody is agreed that it is a very
bad one/' On this subject he quotes Louis Agassiz
as follows: "Let any one who doubts the evil of
* This has been called in question by King, East, and others.
So PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken
philanthropy to break down all barriers between
them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deteri-
oration consequent upon the amalgamation of
races, more wide-spread here than in any country
in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best
qualities of the white man, the negro, and the
Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, defi-
cient in physical and mental energy."
Nevertheless it must be remembered that in
most instances the white blood, at least, which
entered into these combinations was not of very
high quality, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that Mendelian heredity, which is operative here
as everywhere else, will lead to all kinds of combi-
nations good, bad, and indifferent even among
the offspring of the same parents, and much more
among offspring of different parents. It is highly
probable that while some of these hybrids may show
all the bad qualities of both parents, others may
show the good qualities of both and indeed in
this respect resemble the children in any pure-
bred family. But it is practically certain that the
general or average results of the crossing of a su-
perior and an inferior race are to strike a balance
somewhere between the two. This is no contra-
diction of the principles of Mendelian inheritance
but rather the application of these principles to a
general population. The general effect of the
hybridization of races cannot fail to lead to a lower-
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 51
ing of the qualities of the higher race and a raising
of the qualities of the lower one.
Which are the* higher and which the lower races
of mankind must depend largely upon the point
of view and the qualities under consideration.
No race has a monopoly of good or bad qualities;
all that can be said is that certain traits are more
frequently found in one race than in another.
In love of adventure, of discovery, and of freedom
within the limits of social order the white race is
probably supreme, and these qualities under favor-
able environment have led to its great scientific,
industrial, and political development. In virility,
conservatism, and reverence for social obligations
the yellow race, as a whole, is probably superior
to the white. If the white race worships liberty,
the yellow race deifies duty; if the former is socially
centrifugal, the latter is centripetal. The brown,
red, and black races each have their characteristic
virtues and defects which have become proverbial.
Every race has contributed something of value to
civilization, though there can be no doubt that
the white, yellow, and brown races lead, and prob-
ably in the order named.
No doubt if all the good qualities of different
races could be combined and all of the bad quali-
ties eliminated the result would be a type greatly
superior to any existing race. In domestic animals
and cultivated plants such combinations and elimi-
nations are frequently made, and if a higher power
52 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
should deal with man as he does with his domesti-
cated animals, no doubt it would be possible to
bring about similar results in the human species.
Even if we are horrified by the thought, we can-
not hide the fact that all present signs point to an
intimate commingling of all existing human types
within the next five or ten thousand years at most.
Unless we can re-establish geographical isolation
of races, we cannot prevent their interbreeding.
By rigid laws excluding immigrants of other races,
such as they have at present in New Zealand and
Australia, it may be possible for a time to main-
tain the purity of the white race in certain countries,
but with the constantly increasing intercommuni-
cations between all lands and peoples such artificial
barriers will probably prove as ineffectual in the
long run as the Great Wall of China. The races of
the world are not drawing apart but together, and
it needs only the vision that will look ahead a few
thousand years to see the blending of all racial
currents into a common stream.
What the relative contributions of existing races
to this composite race will be is an interesting
speculation. Relative viability and fecundity of
different races and hybrids as well as psychological
affinities and antipathies are important factors in
this problem. There is in general much less senti-
ment for racial purity on the part of colored races
than in the case of the white race, and on the part
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 53
of white men than of white women, consequently
white blood will diffuse more rapidly through col-
ored populations than colored blood through the
white. More important still is the fact that for
centuries to come Europe, North America, and
Australasia will continue to be the centres of the
white race; China and Japan of the yellow race;
and Africa of the black race, but on the borders
around these centres, where the races meet and
overlap, there will be miscegenation. In these
centres of the white, yellow, and black races we may
assume that the populations will for a long time
remain predominantly white, yellow, or black, but
with increasing infiltration of foreign blood. The
longer this segregation can be maintained the larger,
other factors being equal, will become the ratio of
whites to other races and the greater will be their
contribution to the composite race. Every con-
sideration should lead those who believe in the
superiority of the white race to strive to preserve
its purity and to establish and maintain the segre-
gation of the races, for the longer this is maintained
the greater the preponderance of the white race
will be, but in the end amalgamation of all races
in all parts of the world will probably be as complete
as in the case of Greeks, Latins, Saracens, Nor-
mans, and Africans in Sicily and Southern Italy.
vf
PRESENT AND FUTURE EVOLUTION OF
MAN
A. PHYSICAL EVOLUTION
SINCE the beginnings of recorded history there
have been very few and wholly minor evolutionary
changes in the body of man. Chief among these
are the decreasing size of the little toe and perhaps
a corresponding increase in the size of the great
toe; decreasing size and strength of the teeth,
especially of the wisdom teeth; and probably a
general lowering of the perfection of sense-organs.*
These changes are in the main degenerative ones
due to the less rigid elimination of physical im-
perfections under conditions of civilization than in
a state of barbarism or savagery. Such changes
are insignificant as compared with the enormous
changes which led to the evolution of man from
prehuman ancestors.
Individual variations due to hybridization or to
environmental influences are always present but
they have little evolutionary value. By hybridi-
zation of various races and stocks there has come
to be a complicated intermixture of racial charac-
*See Osborn, H. F. "Contemporary Evolution of Man."
54
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 55
ters; new combinations of characters are thus
produced, but new individual characters have not
been evolved by hybridization. By changes in
environment modifications have -been produced in
development but not in heredity, these are fluctua-
tions and not mutations.
To a certain extent evolution may be regarded as
a response of the organism to environment, whether
we have regard to the origin of mutations in the
germplasm or to the survival of mutations after
they have arisen. But in the case of man the
physical environment has probably far less evolu-
tionary value than in lower animals, for by means
of intelligence man is able, to a great extent, to
control his environment. In cold climates he does
not need to grow a thicker coat of hair in order to
keep from freezing to death; he can put on or off
heavier clothing, as he pleases; he can even change
the climate of his residence to suit his needs.
Shortage of one kind of food does not compel him
to undergo changes of teeth and stomach to fit
him to use other foods; he can produce more food
of the first kind or can so change and modify new
kinds of food that the old digestive system can deal
with them. Therefore to the extent that evolution
depends upon changing physical environment, man
is to a great extent removed from such influences
since he can control his environment.
Furthermore the greatest of the directing factors
$6 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
of evolution, namely natural selection, or the sur-
vival of the fittest individuals, has been largely
nullified in civilized society. By the most extraor-
dinary efforts we manage to save the weak and
deformed in body, the feeble-minded and insane,
the evil and antisocial. We are just beginning to
realize that intelligent human selection must take
the place of natural selection and that the most un-
fit must be prevented from perpetuating their kind;
but is it not evident that the stream cannot rise
higher than its source, and that the most that can
be expected from such artificial selection is that
mankind as a whole shall approach somewhat
nearer to the level of the best individuals of the
past and present ?
Eugenics
Many persons who recognize that human evolu-
tion is not progressing favorably look to eugenics,
or selective mating, as the best available method of
promoting human progress. And there is no doubt
that if the same methods which have been applied
to the breeding of domestic animals and plants
could be applied to man, many important improve-
ments in the human stock could be effected.
Chiefly by means of selective breeding, all of the
best types of domesticated animals and cultivated
plants have been produced, or rather made up and
isolated, for the breeder can only wait and watch
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 57
for favorable mutations to appear; once they have
appeared, he can by appropriate cross-breeding
combine these new qualities with other desirable
ones, and after he has made up a desirable combi-
nation he can, by close inbreeding, perpetuate it
and thus produce a new breed or race.
Mutations of many sorts, good, bad, and indiffer-
ent, are occurring in the human race, and by cross-
breeding good combinations as well as bad ones are
produced. Under a system of selective mating
comparable to that practised by animal and plant
breeders, it would be possible to perpetuate the
good combinations and eliminate the bad and thus
to improve the human breed, but this would in-
volve such changes in our ideas of monogamy and
morality as are scarcely conceivable. And even
such a thoroughgoing system of eugenics would not
really lead to progressive evolution, with the forma-
tion of new characters and the emergence of a new
type of man, but only to new combinations of exist-
ing characters.
One of the serious difficulties in the way of a really
thoroughgoing system of eugenics is the impossi-
bility of determining what combinations are really
best and how to bring them about. Until we know
vastly more about the genesis of personality than
we do now, positive eugenics must be a relatively
weak and blundering procedure. It would probab-
ly have robbed the world of some of its greatest
58 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
men, whose antecedents were most unpromising.
The most intelligent eugenicist cannot tell us how
to get the best results; he can rarely, if ever, get
children of his own that are entirely satisfactory;
usually the most that he can do is to tell us how
to avoid the worst results. As Huxley says: "The
points of a good or bad citizen are really far harder
to discern than those of a puppy or a short-horn
calf. ... I sometimes wonder whether people
who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever
dispassionately consider their own history. Surely
one must be very 'fit' indeed not to know of an
occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life when it would
have been only too easy to qualify for a place
among the unfit."*
In all domestic animals and cultivated plants
it is found that the breeder can only sort out and
recombine the characters which are given; he
cannot make new characters or hereditary factors,
and consequently he soon reaches the limits of the
possible improvement of a breed and must then
wait until a new variation or mutation appears.
Similarly the eugenicist, even if he could control
human breeding as thoroughly as the animal
breeder, could not expect to bring about indefinite
improvement, but would soon reach a limit in every
line beyond which he could not go until a new
mutation furnished the material. And even muta-
* Huxley, T. H. "Evolution and Ethics," p. 39.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 59
tions have their limits, beyond which they cannot
go without upsetting the entire organic equilibrium.
It is conceivable, though not probable, that the
time may come when we may learn how to produce
human mutations, possibly how to produce good
mutations. If this should ever happen we should
have a wonderful opportunity to speed up and
control human evolution. But at present this is
merely a dream, and there is no likelihood that it
will ever be realized. Important, therefore, as
eugenics is in bringing about better combinations
of hereditary traits, it does not hold forth the prom-
ise of endless progress.
From all these points of view it is evident that
the conception of unlimited evolutionary progress
in any particular line, whether among plants,
animals, or men is a mere chimera. In every line
of progress a limit is sooner or later reached, beyond
which it is not possible to go. Further progress,
if it occurs at all, must be in other lines.
For at least one hundred centuries there has been
no notable progress in the evolution of the human
body. The limits of physical evolution have appar-
ently been reached in the most perfect specimens
of mankind. The fact that man is not now evolv-
ing rapidly, if at all, is often taken to mean that he
was always as he is now, that he never did evolve,
but the evidence is all against this. On the other
hand, it is said by those who believe in endless prog-
60 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
ress that ten thousand years is entirely too brief
a time in which to look for marked evolutionary
advance, and we are admonished to remember that
evolution is slow and that time is long; but, after
all, the time available for evolution is not infinite,
and ten thousand years representing three or four
hundred human generations is quite long enough
to reveal any marked tendency in evolution.
There can be no doubt that human evolution
has halted, either temporarily or permanently,
and when we consider the fact that in every line
of evolution progress is most rapid at first and then
slows down until it stops, we cannot avoid the sus-
picion that in those lines in which human evolution
has gone farthest and fastest it has practically
come to an end. At least we may affirm that there
is no prospect that the hand, the eye, or the brain
of man will ever be much more complex or perfect
than at present. It is, of course, possible that the
hand of man might evolve into a more perfect
climbing, swimming, or flying organ, but such spe-
cialization would unfit it to do the many duties
which it now performs and upon which human
progress has so largely depended. It is possible
that man might develop the telescopic vision of
an eagle or the microscopic vision of a fly, but
what advantage would there be in such specializa-
tion when by means of his inventions he can have
both telescopic and microscopic vision far better
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 61
than any other creature in the world possesses ? It
is, of course, possible that the brain of man may
undergo further evolution in the future, just as it is
possible that the elephant may evolve a longer trunk
or the giraffe a longer neck. But the size of the
human brain has not increased since the times of
the Cro-Magnon race, say 20,000 years ago, and the
great prevalence of nervous disorders in the most
highly intelligent classes of the present day indi-
cates that the nervous system has already de-
veloped to a point where it is getting out of balance
with the other vital functions. In every line of
progressive evolution there comes a time when
specialization can go no farther without interfering
with the harmonious interrelation of parts and thus
breaking down co-operation.
In most respects man is a generalized rather than
a highly specialized type of vertebrate, as is shown
by his hands, feet, limbs, teeth, food, digestive
system, and sense-organs, and there is no evidence
that in the future he will become more highly
specialized in these regards; on the contrary, so
far as these animal functions are concerned, present
tendencies in human evolution seem in the main to
be making for a simpler and more generalized or-
ganism, as is shown in the simplification of many
organs and systems, the progressive degeneration
of certain parts, and the presence of many rudi-
mentary structures.
62 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
However in the structures and functions of the
human brain progressive evolution has gone farther
than in the case of any other creature, and this
combination of a highly specialized brain with
other organs of a more generalized type has been
of the greatest advantage in human evolution, for
it has made possible at the same time unequalled
intelligence and remarkable plasticity and adapta-
bility of bodily functions.
I suppose that from the evolutionary point of
view the most perfect type of man would be one
in which the brain had reached the highest possible
stage of differentiation and in which the rest of
the body remained in a relatively generalized con-
dition. H. G. Wells, who was a zoologist before he
became a writer of fiction and history, represents
the Martians, who are often imagined to have
evolved farther than man, as having enormous
brains and undifferentiated bodies, little more than
generalized protoplasm. But man requires diges-
tive, circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive
systems for his survival as well as a nervous system,
and if the latter becomes so developed that it
destroys the proper balance, all comes to an end.
The great increase in nervous and mental disorders
and the increasing sterility of the intellectual
classes warn us that for the present at least the
evolution of the brain and nervous system of man
has practically reached its limit.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 63
Metchnikoff* has pointed out many disharmo-
nies or unfitnesses in the human organization affect-
ing digestion, reproduction, and self-preservation;
indeed all organs and functions of the human body
may show these disharmonies. All of pathology
and most of the subject-matter of medicine is con-
cerned with such disharmonies, and they are found
not merely in man's bodily structures and functions
but also in his mental and social life. Indeed such
disharmonies are illustrations of the fact that
nowhere in the living world are adaptations perfect
or complete, and although the worst failures are
quickly eliminated, so that there is a tendency for
adaptations to become more and more perfect, yet
from a variety of causes, failures of old adaptations
continue to occur and new environmental condi-
tions arise to which new adaptations must be
made.
While it is true that even the oldest and most
complete adaptations are rarely, if ever, ideally
perfect, it is especially in the more recent adapta-
tions to new conditions of life that failure of adjust-
ment is most evident. In the case of man there
are partial failures of adjustment to even so ancient
a condition as the erect posture, and in the case of
more recent changes of condition or environment,
such as modern food, clothing, housing, and indus-
try, or the parasitic and germ diseases that accom-
* Metchnikoff, E. "The Nature of Man," New York, 1903.
64 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
pany civilization and dense populations, such fail-
ures or disharmonies are much more evident. If
the environment should remain fairly constant, it
is probable that the human organism would in
time adjust itself to these new conditions. There is
evidence of an increasing immunity of civilized
races to certain diseases, and in time, if natural
selection were allowed to work without interference,
it is probable that complete immunity to some of
these diseases might become general. But, on the
other hand, modern medicine is finding ways to
control and even eliminate certain of these diseases
in a way much more rapid and less destructive to
human life than is natural selection. Here again, as
in so many other instances, intelligence is replac-
ing the blind forces of nature, and human evolution
is progressing not so much by adaptation of the
organism to the environment as of the environment
to the organism.
The prolongation of individual human lives by
means of medicine, surgery, and general scientific
knowledge has led many persons to hope that the
present maximum length of life may be greatly
extended in the future so that men may once more
reach the reputed ages of the patriarchs. But the
saving of individual lives has not extended the
maximum length of life. The oldest individuals
to-day are no older than those of prescientific
times. The average life of the race has been length-
ened chiefly through the reduction of infant mor-
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 65
tality. But since it has been proven that longevity
is hereditary, it may well be that the artificial
prolongation of the lives of the hereditarily weak
and short-lived may actually reduce the natural
longevity of the race as a whole.
In any event there is no probability that science
will greatly extend the present maximum length
of life, and there is no basis whatever for the hope
which is sometimes expressed that it will ultimately
banish death altogether. How fortunate this is
will be appreciated when it is recalled that without
death and the succession of generations there could
be little or no evolution and that under present
conditions immortality of the body would be the
greatest possible hindrance to human progress.
By eugenics and euthenics the general level of
physical development of man may be improved
just as it has been in many domestic animals;
many diseases may be eliminated and immunity to
others may be increased, feeble-bodiedness and
feeble-mindedness may disappear and the race as
a whole may be made more hardy; but there are
no indications that future man will be much more
perfect in body than the most perfect individuals
of the present, or than the most perfect men and
women in the days of Phidias and Praxiteles.
B. INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION
No one can doubt that there has been a wonder-
ful development of intellect throughout the course
66 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
of past evolution. Among the vertebrates the
class of fishes which came first in the course of
evolution is least intelligent, while birds and mam-
mals which came last are most intelligent. And
of all orders of mammals the higher Primates, which
are the most recent in origin, show the greatest
intelligence. Similarly in the case of man, there is
abundant evidence that there has been growth of
intelligence from the earliest to the latest types and
that this development has gone farther in some
races than in others.
Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that
even in the most intelligent races and individuals
there is still much room for intellectual growth;
and when we consider the great mass of irrational
and emotional mankind, we are impressed with the
thought that the race as a whole is just emerging
from unreason and that instinct and emotion are
still the masters of life.
Surely there is great room for improvement here,
but so, also, is there room for intellectual improve-
ment in monkeys and dogs and all other animals
below man. The fact that there is room for im-
provement by no means signifies that improvement
will take place. Just as in the case of physical
evolution, so here, also, there are limits beyond
which intellectual evolution cannot go, and these
limits are far short of ideal perfection. The rec-
ord of the intellectual development of mankind
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 67
during the historic period may seem to refute this
conclusion and to prove that even if men are not
growing more perfect physically they are growing
more perfect intellectually. Let us examine some-
what critically this claim.
We certainly know more things than the ancients
did, and we are proud to think that
"The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the
But it is most important to distinguish between
knowledge and intellect, between things known and
the capacity for knowing.
By means of language, tradition, and writing
the experiences of past generations can be handed
on to present and future ones, and thus each
generation may receive the knowledge accumu-
lated throughout the past. In this sense we are
"the heirs of all the ages."
Knowledge is certainly growing, but is intellec-
tual capacity increasing ? Does any one think that
in the past two or three thousand years there has
been any increase in human intellect comparable
with the increase in knowledge? Do the best
minds of to-day excel the minds of Socrates and
Plato and Aristotle? On the contrary, it is the
opinion of those who have studied the subject
most that no modern race of men is the equal
intellectually of the ancient Greek race.
68 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
In the two centuries between 500 and 300 B. C. the small
and relatively barren country of Attica, with an area and
total population about equal to that of the present State of
Rhode Island, but with less than one-fifth as many free
persons, produced at least 25 illustrious men. Among
statesmen and commanders there were: Miltiades, Them-
istocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Phocion; among poets,
jEschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes; among
philosophers and men of science, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Demetrius, Theophrastus; among architects and artists,
Ictinus, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polygnotus; among historians,
Thucydides and Xenophon; among orators, ^Eschines, De-
mosthenes, Isocrates, Lysias.
In this small country in the space of two centuries there
appeared such a galaxy of illustrious men as has never been
found on the whole earth in any two centuries since that
time. Galton concludes that the average ability of the
Athenian race of that period was, on the lowest estimate,
as much greater than that of the English race of the present
day as the latter is above that of the African negro.*
There has been no notable progress in the intel-
lectual capacity of man in the past two or three
thousand years, and it seems probable that the
limits of intellectual evolution have been reached
in the greatest minds of the race. Even in the most
distant future there may never appear greater
geniuses than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Shakes-
peare, Newton, Darwin.
Undoubtedly eugenics and education can do
much to raise the intellectual level of the general
mass, but they cannot create a new order of in-
* Conklin. "Heredity and Environment," 1920, p. 276.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 69
tellect. Increasing size of brain and complexity of
nervous organization lead to mental and physical
instability and disharmony, and the great increase
in nervous and mental diseases in modern life warns
us that there is a limit to intellectual evolution.
The brain has its limits as a storehouse, and it
necessarily follows that with knowledge continu-
ally increasing and intellectual capacity remaining
stationary each individual mind can take in only
a small portion of the sum of human knowledge.
In this age intellectual specialization is absolutely
necessary. There can never again be an Aristotle,
nor even a Descartes or Humboldt. Progress in
intellectual evolution, no less than in physical,
lies in the direction of increasing specialization and
co-operation, but this progress is no longer taking
place within the individual but in the specialization
and co-operation of many individuals. The intel-
lectual evolution of the individual has virtually
come to an end, but the intellectual evolution of
groups of individuals is only at its beginning.
C. SOCIAL EVOLUTION
But if the evolution of the human individual has
come to an end, certainly the evolution of human
society has not. In social evolution a new path of
progress has been found the end of which no one
can foresee.
Evolution has progressed from one-celled organ-
70 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
isms to many-celled, from small and simple organ-
isms to larger and more complex ones. By the union
of individuals into families and tribes and nations,
still larger and more complex units of organization
were formed, until now, by intelligent human co-
operation, we have governmental units which in-
clude hundreds of millions of men, and we are on
the eve of bringing together into some form of
league or federation all the peoples of the earth.
Three main stages in the past evolution of human
culture (the material aspect of which may be de-
fined as knowledge of, and control over, environ-
ment) are generally recognized, viz.: Savagery,
Barbarism, and Civilization. The lowest stages of
human culture, as contrasted with prehuman con-
ditions, begin with the fashioning of crude stone
implements and with the use of fire. Middle stages
are marked by the making of beautiful stone imple-
ments and by the introduction of the use of copper
and bronze. The highest stage is characterized
by the use of iron, the invention of writing and all
that goes with this, and by increasing knowledge
of, and control over, the forces of nature. Possibly
future historians may record that super-civiliza-
tion began with the end of wars and the co-operation
of all the peoples of the earth. At least there is
every evidence that human culture is still advancing
and that the end is not yet in sight.
Different civilizations of the past have had their
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 71
birth, maturity, and death, and our civilization may
possibly follow a similar course, but as generation
follows generation, so one civilization gives birth
to another. After civilization had once appeared
it was never entirely lost from all the earth. It
decayed in Egypt and Babylonia, but the torch
lighted there was caught up by Phoenicia, Greece,
and Rome, and when these went down the flame
was passed on to other lands and peoples.
In the whole of this evolution of culture each
age or people builds upon preceding ones, and prog-
ress has been the result of co-operative effort.
Each great advance was due to the discoveries of
one, or at most of a few gifted men, but these dis-
coveries could not have been made except for the
work which had gone before. Probably the great-
est genius of this or of any former age, if thrown
entirely upon his own resources without the in-
struction, experience, or achievements of others to
guide and help him, would be unable to invent a
phonetic alphabet, to smelt iron ore, to make
bronze implements, or even to start a fire by arti-
ficial means. Increasing knowledge of, and control
over, nature is the result of the labors of countless
individuals, the preservation of these results and
the handing down of them to successive generations.
The individual man has not grown more perfect
physically or intellectually, but society has ad-
vanced from age to age because it has profited by
72 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
experiences of the past. Those who would wipe out
present institutions and throw away all the dearly
bought experiences of the past would not only
destroy the possibilities of progress but they would
wreck civilization and reduce man to savagery.
At present social evolution is proceeding at a
rate which is amazing if not alarming. All kinds
of variations and mutations of the social organiza-
tion are occurring. Whole nations are making
the most stupendous experiments, some of which
are bound to end disastrously, but if only we have
the intelligence to learn by the experience of others,
and the wisdom to preserve the good results of
these experiments and to eliminate the bad, social
progress will be certain and rapid.
The fact that the evolution of human society
and of human inventions has gone forward so rapid-
ly that every one can see the great progress made in
his own lifetime, led Samuel Butler* and certain
followers of hisf to the conclusion that social and
intellectual evolution is the cause of physical
evolution.
Butler observed that evolution in man does not
take place to any important extent in his body
but that it is proceeding with great rapidity in the
tools, weapons, and machines which man uses and
* Butler, Samuel. "Erewhon," London, 1908.
t Darbishire, A. D. "Introduction to a Biology," New York,
1917.
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 73
which are, in his words, "limbs which are loose
and lie about detached." Intellect and invention
are the motive power in this form of evolution, and
he assumes that the same may be true of all evolu-
tion, physical and social as well as intellectual.
Others maintain that "cell intelligence," which
is assumed to be present in all protoplasm, is the
cause of all forms of evolution.*
Such a conception not only confuses the different
lines of evolution and their causes, but it really
denies all the facts and evidences in the case by
putting the highest and latest product of the proc-
ess into its earliest and most elemental stages.
It is not a theory of evolution but rather one of
involution or creation; it is not a new conception
of life and its origin but the oldest known concep-
tion.
Dissatisfaction with current views must be great
indeed, and the evidence against those views and
in favor of the ancient ones must be very convinc-
ing to justify such a reaction. And yet almost no
evidence is presented against the generally accepted
view and in favor of the ancient one. Such essays
evidently owe their origin to emotion rather than
to reason, to sentiment rather than science; they
are based upon desire rather than evidence, and
they appeal especially to those who are able to
*Quevli, N. "Cell Intelligence the Cause of Evolution," Min-
neapolis, 1916.
74 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
believe what they desire to believe and who are
accustomed to say of evolution, "I prefer to trace
my origin to the Garden of Eden rather than to a
zoological garden," as if it were possible for a ra-
tional being to believe anything he prefers to believe !
De Vries, Morgan, and many others have shown
that physical evolution proceeds by sudden changes
known as mutations, rather than by minute and
continuous variations, and de Vries supposes that
there are periods of mutation alternating with
periods of relative stability. The present seems to
be a mutation period in the evolution of human
society. One often hears the expression that cer-
tain social changes must come "by evolution or by
revolution." But there is such a thing as evolution
by revolution, and it seems probable that to-day
we are witnessing this process in human society.
Whether such evolution is going forward or back-
ward the future only will reveal.
The rapidity of social evolution as contrasted
with the slowness of physical evolution is probably
due to the fact that changes in germplasm occur
much more slowly than changes in habits. In
intelligent society past experiences are transmitted
to future generations, each generation standing on
the shoulders, as it were, of the preceding one,
whereas the physical man begins his development
anew in each generation from the germ cells, and if
he inherits any bodily features acquired by the
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 75
experiences of his ancestors a thing which seems
most doubtful they are very few. On the other
hand, individual experiences are more quickly
impressed upon the intellect than upon the body
or the instincts. Intelligence is a great time-saver,
as contrasted with " trial and error." Changes in
behavior due to changes in reflexes or instincts are
almost, if not quite, as slow as changes in germplasm
itself, but changes due to intelligence may take
place with "the rapidity of thought"; and where
such changes can be transmitted by " social inheri-
tance" to the next generation, as is true of human
experiences and learning and institutions, progress
is most rapid. In this respect social progress is
entirely comparable to ontogeny, or the develop-
ment of the individual, where each step leads to
the next and where every later stage is built di-
rectly on an earlier one. Indeed, what we call
social evolution in any single race or people is
really the individual development or ontogeny of
that particular society.
Evolution has progressed from amoeba to man;
from reflexes to instincts, intelligence, and reason;
from the solitary individual to the family, the
tribe, the modern state, and, in spite of narrow-
minded and reactionary politicians, we or our
descendants will yet see the whole human race
brought together into a Society of Nations, a
"Federation of the World."
76 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
Just as there are many disharmonies or failures
of adaptation in the human body and mind, so, also,
there are many disharmonies in human society.
In particular there are the conflicts of the social
and antisocial instincts, of selfishness and altruism,
justice and injustice, love and hate, peace and war;
there is lacking in contemporary society that degree
of specialization which would enable each individual
to find the work and place where he would be most
useful and there is a lamentable failure of co-opera-
tion between individuals, classes, nations, and
races.
But throughout the course of evolution there has
been a continual elimination of the least fit and a
survival of the fit, and in the long run we may expect
natural selection to lead to the elimination of the
antisocial and to the increase of social specializa-
tion and co-operation. Indeed, this is no mere
matter of faith, but is a process which is going on
more rapidly to-day than ever before in human
history. The elimination of the socially unfit will
ultimately give the world to the fit.
The great goal toward which the human race is
moving is the rational organization of society.
The societies of ants, bees, and termites; of fishes,
birds, and gregarious mammals are based wholly
upon instincts, and while some of these societies
are extraordinarily perfect, owing to the long and
constant action of natural selection, they are rela-
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 77
lively inflexible and unfitted to sudden changes
of environment. Human society is less perfectly
adapted to a particular, narrow environment than
that of some social insects, but, thanks to intelli-
gence and the capacity of learning by experience,
it is vastly more plastic and perfectible.
The short and narrow view of human society
and history is often discouraging and at times it
seems desperate, but the long view is more hopeful.
The human race has a surprising amount of resili-
ency and adaptability, it has passed through many
terrible crises, many experiments have proved
colossal failures, many nations and civilizations
have gone down in the wreckage of time, and yet
the race survives and society moves forward. Our
cherished institutions and social organizations may
be only temporary, but the records of social evolu-
tion show that the world moves forward and justi-
fies the faith that mankind will ultimately reach
the goal of a really rational organization of human
society.
D. MAN'S CONQUEST OF NATURE
The evolution of man is no longer limited to his
body or mind, nor even to society, but by adding
to his own powers the forces of nature, man has
entered upon a new path of progress. The differ-
entiations of various members of a colony of ants
or bees are limited to their bodies and are fixed and
78 PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
irreversible; but in human society differentiations
are no longer confined to the bodies of individuals
but have become, as it were, extra-corporeal.
By this control over nature man has taken into
his evolution the whole of his environment. Al-
though he is not as strong as the elephant nor as
deft as the spider nor as swift as the antelope nor as
powerful in the water as the whale or in the air as
the eagle, yet by his control of the forces of nature
outside of his body he can excel all animals in
strength and delicacy of movement, in speed and
power on land, in water, and in air.
This new path of progress is in all respects the
most important which has ever been discovered
by organisms, and no one can foresee the end of this
process of annexing to our own powers the illimitable
forces of the universe.
VII
WILL THERE BE A HIGHER ANIMAL
THAN MAN?
THERE is no probability that a higher animal
than man will ever appear on the earth, and the
only reason for surmising that other species of the
genus Homo may appear in the future is the fact
that there have been species in the past which do
not exist at present. These prehistoric species have
everywhere been replaced by the existing species,
perhaps because they were intellectually inferior.
It is possible, of course, that similar causes may lead
to the elimination of the present species, but this
does not seem probable for the following reasons:
(i) All races of man may and do interbreed,
owing to fertility inter se and to the lack of geo-
graphical isolation; consequently there is a growing
tendency to the breaking down of racial isolation
and to the hybridization of existing races. This is
clearly shown in all countries where races, even the
most distinct, have been brought together, as in
North and South America, the West Indies, Aus-
tralasia, Polynesia, Asia, and Africa. . Such hy-
bridization may possibly lead to the production of
new types or mutants, but these would probably
79
8o PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES
be " swamped" and lost unless they were isolated.
All present signs point to an intimate commingling
of all existing human types within the next few
thousand years at most. The breaking down of
geographical and racial isolation will restrict further
race differentiation, and this will probably work
against the evolution of a still higher race. Even
if new races may be developed by psychological or
social selection there is no likelihood that new
species will thus arise which will supplant the ex-
isting species.
(2) The development of moral and social ideals
of equal justice for all people will prevent the ex-
termination of inferior races, and democratic ideals
of self-government and majority rule will probably
prevent even the merciful elimination of all except
the most perfect types. The majority cannot be
expected to decree its own effacement; the most
that can be expected is that the majority will elim-
inate from reproduction only the most inferior and
defective individuals. By this means the stand-
ards of the race may be preserved at the present
level, but they cannot be greatly advanced. No
great improvement in domesticated animals or
plants would be possible if breeders were able to
eliminate only the most inferior individuals, and
the same will certainly be true of human breeds.
There is no present indication, therefore, that a new
and higher species of man will develop on the earth,
PATHS AND POSSIBILITIES 81
and there is no probability that some other genus
or class or phylum may give rise to an animal
physically, intellectually, and socially superior to
man.
It is possible, but not probable, that the entire
human species may become extinct in advance of
other higher animals; but even if this should hap-
pen, from what other source could a superior animal
arise? No other animal approaches man in intel-
lectual capacity, upon which depend the rational
organization of society and the conquest of all
nature.
However imperfect, irrational, and antisocial
mankind may be; however much we may laugh or
weep over his simian characteristics and at times
sympathize with Mark Twain's comments on
"the damned human race," we may feel confident
that in the long ages of future evolution no other
greatly superior animal will appear upon this planet.
If a superior species is to appear it must come from
human stock.
II
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF
SOCIETY
A. PHYSICAL, INTELLECTUAL, SOCIAL EVOLUTION
NOT ANTAGONISTIC
EVOLUTION has proceeded along many lines and
not along a single one; it is best represented, not
by a ladder or scale but by a branching tree in
which growth has ceased in certain branches but
is still going on in others, and while many branches
grow upward, some turn down. In one case it is
progressive and in another retrogressive, in one
case it leads to increased and in another to decreased
size and complexity of structure; in one case to
physical strength and combativeness, in another to
weakness, cunning, and concealment. In man there
have been three main lines of evolution physical,
intellectual, social. The fundamental causes of
progress may be the same in all of these lines;
it may be, for example, the survival of the fittest,
but the standards of fitness are different in the
three. Physically, the fittest is the most viable;
intellectually, the fittest is the most rational;
socially, the fittest is the most ethical*
86 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
These three standards are often in conflict,
they are always balanced against one another, but
they are not mutually exclusive; all three may,
and do, coexist in such a way that each strengthens
the other. In his famous Romanes Lectures on
"Evolution and Ethics," Huxley says:* "Let us
understand, once for all, that the ethical progress
of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic
process, still less in running away from it, but in
combating it." But I fancy that even in Huxley's
thought the combat between ethical progress and
the struggle for physical existence consisted in
keeping this struggle within certain bounds rather
than in eliminating it altogether. The progress of
mankind involves the preservation of a proper bal-
ance between physical, intellectual, and social fit-
ness; no one of these must go so far as to harm or
destroy either of the others. Least of all is there
any justification for the views of Bernhardi and
other biological militarists, that the most powerful,
domineering, and combative are the fittest socially.
We know as a certainty that this is not the case, and
that such ideas would lead to the utter destruction
of society. Mankind may have lost something in
physical fitness by curbing "Nature red in tooth
and claw," but it has gained immeasurably through
the establishment of society, which would have
been impossible with unlimited struggle for exist-
* " Evolution and Ethics," p. 83.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 87
ence between individuals, classes, and nations.
Darwin himself, long ago, protested against this
mistaken application of natural selection to society
and showed that in social evolution the most ethical
is the most fit.*
But while these different lines of evolution are
not necessarily antagonistic it is important to re-
member that all life processes, including evolution,
are balanced, as it were, between contending forces
and principles. Life itself, as well as evolution,
is a continual adjustment of internal to external
conditions, a balance between constructive and
destructive processes, a combination of differentia-
tion and integration, of variation and inheritance,
a compromise between the needs of the individual
and those of the species. And in addition to these
conflicting relations we find in man the opposition
of instinct and intelligence, emotion and reason,
selfishness and altruism, individual freedom and
social obligation. Progress is the product of the
harmonious correlation of organism and environ-
ment, specialization and co-operation, instinct and
intelligence, liberty and duty.
In short it is impossible for man to make real
and lasting progress by destroying the balance
which exists between these three lines of evolution.
* In a letter to Wallace he says that "the struggle between the
races of man depended entirely on intellectual and moral qualities "
("More Letters of Charles Darwin," vol. II, p. 33).
88 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
Here, as everywhere else in the world of living
things, such progress consists in maintaining a
proper balance between many desirable ends.
B. SOCIAL PROGRESS MEANS GREATER SPECIAL-
IZATION AND CO-OPERATION
Organization, whether physical, intellectual, or
social, means differentiation and integration, spe-
cialization and co-operation, diversity and har-
mony. Progressive evolution invariably and inevi-
tably means increasing differentiation and integra-
tion. In the long history of life upon the earth,
organisms have varied in every possible way; they
may be said to have made millions and millions of
experiments in finding the path of progressive
evolution, and in every instance this path has been
in the direction of greater specialization and co-
operation. One-celled organisms, in which the
greatest amount of individual liberty is preserved
to the separate cells, have undergone but little
progressive evolution and have remained in prac-
tically the same stage of organization for millions
of years. Many-celled organisms, on the other
hand, have undergone the most varied and exten-
sive evolution; and this has been due to the fact
that the specialization of single cells and their
co-operation in the work of the organism as a
whole has made possible the highest types of
organisms.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 89
In a similar way one may trace the evolution of
animal societies from a condition in which extreme
individualism prevails up to societies of ants,
bees, and termites in which the specialization of
individuals is higher, the mutual dependence more
complete, and the work which the colony is able
to perform is immensely greater and more perfect
than could be accomplished by any number of
individuals working separately. What the indi-
vidual cannot do because of lack of strength or
specialization or time, the social group can accom-
plish with the strength and specialization of all
and through long periods of time.
What is true of insects in this respect is also true
of men. It matters not that in the one case activi-
ties are governed by instinct alone and in the other
by intelligence as well as instinct; the final result,
the biological ideal, is the same, whether the advan-
tages of higher organization have been discovered
by natural selection or by intelligence. If human
society is to be something more than an aggrega-
tion of individuals, if it is to accomplish more than
can be performed by separate persons, it must be
through higher and higher organization, that is
through greater specialization and more complete
co-operation. There is no doubt that the evolution
of human society has been in this direction, and the
entire past history of living things indicates that
further progress of society must be along this line.
90 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
C. SOCIETY FOUNDED ON INSTINCTS
The integrating factors in all animal societies
are instincts rather than intelligence. That this
is true of ants, bees, and wasps, of fishes, birds,
wolves, and sheep no one will question. That it is
equally true of human society is plainly apparent
to any one who studies primitive man or who
analyzes the behavior of even the highest races.
Even in man, instinct is more universal and more
powerful than reason; indeed, reason plays a rela-
tively small part in the lives and activities of most
men. The contrary opinion is due to our inveterate
habit of acting instinctively and then attempting
to explain to ourselves or to others the reason for
the act. Indeed, mankind, as a whole, has but
recently begun to emerge from a life of instinct to
one of intelligence and reason.* Some races and
some individuals have gone farther in this direction
than others, but with the great mass of mankind
instinct is still the guide of life.
Descartes begins his famous "Discourse on
Method" with these words: "Good sense or
reason is, of all things among men, the most equally
distributed," No modern philosopher or scientist
would agree to this; on the contrary, he would say:
"Instinct is, of all psychical things among men, the
* On the transition from instinct to intelligence and reason, see
Conklin, " Heredity and Environment," pp. 43-49.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 91
most equally distributed." Instinct and not reason
is the source and ultimate cause of human society
as well as of most human behavior.
The principal instincts of all animals are those
which concern safety, food, and reproduction;
the most important social instincts have to do
with the defense, welfare, and perpetuity of the
group. In addition to these general instincts the
following more special ones have served to bind the
higher mammals together in societies:
(1) The instinct of service, especially between
members of the same family or social
group.
(2) The fear of isolation, or disapproval, and the
desire for fellowship, or sympathy.
(3) The tendency to follow trusted leaders, but
not to depart too far from precedents.*
These are the integrating, co-ordinating, harmo-
nizing bonds which unite men in societies. They
are deep-seated instincts not easily overcome.
The presence and power of these instincts in prac-
tically all peoples of the earth has been demon-
strated in a most remarkable manner during the
Great War. It is reassuring to find that the inte-
grative instincts on which society is founded have
not disappeared, and while these foundations re-
main let no one despair of the future of society.
* See Trotter, " Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War/ 1 London,
1916.
92 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
On the other hand, among the higher mammals
and especially among men there are disintegrative
instincts or desires which tend to disrupt societies
or at least to create disharmony. Among these
are:
(1) The desire for individual freedom, even when
it conflicts with the welfare of society.
(2) The tendency to limit social co-operation
to groups or classes based upon family,
racial, national, temperamental, environ-
mental, industrial, intellectual, or religious
homogeneity.
Such disruptive instincts are not unknown in
animal societies. Ant-colonies often wage relent-
less war upon other colonies, even though they be
of the same species. Under certain circumstances
bees become ruthless robbers and marauders,
waging a war of extermination upon weaker or
defenseless colonies, and even upon other species
of animals; indeed the robber instinct of bees
seems to be a kind of frenzy, or madness, which is
possibly the result of fear and the defensive instinct.
In all animals the class instinct serves to bind to-
gether more firmly the members of the same class
or colony, while at the same time it widens the
gaps between different classes and colonies. In-
deed, it may be said that in animal societies there
are practically no bonds between different groups
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 93
or colonies. These class instincts are very evident
among men. Fortunately they are opposed by
the harmonizing and unifying instincts, and most
of all by intelligence and reason.
The incompleteness of integration, co-operation,
and harmony in human society is due to the fact
that imperfect intelligence and freedom have come
in to interfere with instinct. Disharmony in our-
selves and in society is the price we pay for personal
intelligence and freedom. The more intelligence
one has the greater is his freedom from purely
instinctive responses, but man is never wholly
free from the influences of instinct. The personal
freedom which endangers human co-operation opens
at the same time a new path of progress along ra-
tional lines. In our individual behavior and in our
social activities we now seek the ideal harmony of
the hive, but on the higher plane of intelligence,
freedom, and ethics.
The past evolution of man has occurred almost
entirely without conscious human guidance; but
with the appearance of intellect and the capacity
of profiting by experience a new and great oppor-
tunity and responsibility has been given man of
directing rationally and ethically his future evolu-
tion. More than anything else, that which dis-
tinguishes human society from that of other ani-
mals is just this ability incomplete though it is
to control instincts and emotions by intelligence
94 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
and reason. Those who maintain that racial,
national, and class antagonisms are inevitable be-
cause they are instinctive, and that wars can never
cease because man is by nature a fighting animal,
really deny that mankind can ever learn by experi-
ence; they look backward to the instinctive origins
of society and not forward to its rational organiza-
tion. We shall never cease to have instincts, but,
unless they are balanced and controlled by reason,
human society will revert to the level of the pack
or herd or hive. The foundations of human society
are laid in gregarious instincts, but upon these foun-
dations human intelligence has erected that enor-
mous structure which we call civilization.
II
PROGRESS IN HUMAN HISTORY
THE history of mankind seems to the casual
observer an eternal struggle for existence or su-
premacy on the part of individuals, tribes, classes,
nations, and races. One ideal or people for a while
gains ascendancy and then goes down before other
ideals or peoples, and at times it seems that the
human race learns nothing from experience. Some
one has said that "the only thing we learn from
history is that we learn nothing from it." Many
persons maintain that "what has been will be";
wars, oppression, domination of one group by an-
other will never cease either because they were
ordained by the Creator or are caused by ineradica-
ble traits of human nature.
Human history viewed as such a record of un-
connected events is comparable to natural history
before the general acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution, when every species of animal or plant
was regarded as a distinct and special creation.
The evolutionary view of history has now largely
replaced this older view, and just as in the case of
the evolution of organisms, so, also, in human his-
tory we recognize series of changes genetically
95
96 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
connected but leading nowhere except to mere
diversity, others which lead to increasing adapta-
tion to peculiar conditions, and still others leading
to increasing perfection and complexity of social
organization that is, divergent, adaptive, and pro-
gressive types of evolution characterize human history
as well as the history of animals and plants. As in
the evolution of organisms, so, also, in human his-
tory there have been innumerable changes or di-
versities that have led nowhere; there have been
many changes which have led merely to better
adaptation to peculiar conditions; there have been
very few lines of progress.
Kant held that human progress consists in moral
self-development and self-liberation from the do-
minion of nature leading to a state of the greatest
possible liberty. He recognized the development of
reason in the human species and the establishment
of universal justice through international action
as the goal of history. Hegel, Fichte, and Michelet
represented freedom as the aim of history; Schelling,
the harmonizing of freedom and necessity, of self-
will and the universal will. Condorcet believed
that the growth of equality between nations and
classes not absolute equality, but equality of
right and liberty was the chief lesson of history.
Herder, Flint, and many others regard the growth
of the idea of human unity, of universal brother-
hood, as the chief line of progress throughout the
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 97
historic era. Wells has recently undertaken to
trace the increasing size of governmental units,
the evolution of the world state, and the growth of
the ideal of unification as one of the great lines of
human progress. Others see in the progressive
conquest of nature one of the chief lines of progress
throughout history. To others the growing oppor-
tunities, rights, and powers of the common man,
in short, the growing spirit of democracy marks the
greatest advance of human society.
These lines of human progress are not conflicting,
nor even independent of one another. The develop-
ment of reason in the human race that is, of ra-
tional co-operation must involve the develop-
ment of universal justice. The growing freedom
of the individual in body and mind must be recon-
ciled with increasing social obligations. The de-
velopment of the idea of human unity and brother-
hood must ultimately carry with it the idea of
equality of right and liberty, and of world unifica-
tion. The conquest of nature means greater
freedom through harnessing natural forces rather
than human bodies, through controlling environ-
ment rather than being controlled by it. And all
of these lines of social progress are correlated with
the growth of democracy.
By placing exclusive or even undue emphasis
upon ideals of individual freedom or of social
obligations, of nationalism or of world unification,
98 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
of class or race superiority or of democratic equality,
different peoples and ages have built up great
but unstable civilizations. Genuine and enduring
progress can be achieved only by the reconciliation
of these ideals, which are antagonistic only when
held in extreme forms.
Again and again in the evolution of animals and
plants extreme specialization in certain lines has
brought about rapid progress, but has led to a lack
3f stability and adaptability and has ended in
extinction. And there is good reason to believe
that the same is true of the evolution of human
society. Extreme development of ideals of organi-
sation and efficiency, or of liberty and equality,
leads to an unbalanced state of society; stable
progress consists in advances along many correlated
lines.
Specialization and co-operation under powerful
autocracies were apparently more perfect in many
indent states than in any modern ones. Probably
no modern state has equalled the perfection of such
Forced organization and efficiency as was present
in Egypt under the Pyramid builders. Those pres-
ent-day reformers who desire to force upon the
nasses of mankind the rule of intelligent and
Dowerful autocracies in the interests of efficiency
should do well to reflect upon the lessons of history.
Life and evolution, man's body, mind, and so-
:iety are founded on compromise. Fanatical
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 99
individualism or socialism, universal equality or
inequality, absolute autocracy or democracy find
no foundation or counterpart in biology, for life
and all of its activities consist in compromise,
balance, adjustment between opposing principles.
Ill
THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF
DEMOCRACY
THESE are some of the biological and historical
backgrounds of human society. Let us now apply
some of these principles of evolution and progress
to that system of social organization which we call
democracy.
There have been, and still are, many kinds of
democracy in many fields, and it is therefore diffi-
cult to draw a very sharp and discriminating defi-
nition of what is meant by this term. But it will
be admitted, I think, that democracy in the widest
sense means much more than a form of govern-
ment, that it is indeed a system of social organiza-
tion affecting almost every relation of man to man.
// is a system which, ideally at least, attempts to
equalize the opportunities and responsibilities of
individuals in society. As thus defined it would
apply not merely to government and the adminis-
tration of justice but also to education and indi-
vidual development, to industry and its reward,
property.
But this ideal of absolute equality has never been,
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 101
and can never be, fully realized in human society
because nature has made men unequal in every
respect physically, intellectually, and morally
and there is no possible way in which such natural
inequalities can be wholly eradicated. Further-
more, the very nature of organization, that is,
specialization and co-operation, implies inequali-
ties and limitations; without these there could be
no such thing as society or progress. A society
in which every individual is absolutely free and
equal would be not only an impossibility but also
a contradiction in terms.
Looked at merely as a system of government, a
democracy in which all the people rule directly,
as in ancient Greece, is an impossibility in any
populous state. Instead, modern democracies are
representative governments, in which the people
as a whole choose their representatives to admin-
ister the government for them. General policy
may be determined by the people, but the details
of carrying out of any policy must be left to chosen
leaders. Further, it has been found necessary to
hedge about even such a modified democracy as
this by limiting suffrage to adult persons, not
feeble-minded, insane, or criminal; and it is per-
fectly evident that higher intellectual qualifica-
tions are necessary.
The mental tests used in our army revealed a
surprising amount of illiteracy, and, what is much
IO2
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
worse, an alarmingly low level of average intelli-
gence. These tests were devised to measure intel-
lectual capacity or inherited ability rather than
acquired information or education, and for the first
time they give us a means of estimating the approxi-
mate number of persons in this country of low,
mean, or high intelligence. The tests were of two
sorts, the Alpha test for those who could read and
write, the Beta test for all others. These tests were
taken by about one million and seven hundred
thousand drafted men, who may be assumed to
have been somewhat above the average intelli-
gence of the entire population since none who were
evidently feeble-minded were drafted. Seven grades
were recognized, ranging from A to D , these
grades being designated as follows: A " very superior
intelligence," B "superior," C+ "high average,"
C "average," C "low average," D "inferior,"
D "very inferior." The "mental ages" of these
different grades and the relative numbers in each
are shown in the following table:
GRADE
MENTAL AGE
PER CENT OF
WHOLE
A
18-10
4^
B
l6~I7
Q
C-f
I
ib l A
c
IV-IA
25
c-
12
20
D
II
I*
D-
10
IO
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 103
Assuming that these drafted men are a fair
sample of the entire population of approximately
100 millions, this means that 45 millions, or nearly
one-half of the whole population, will never develop
mental capacity beyond the stage represented by a
normal twelve-year-old child, and that only 13^
millions will ever show superior intelligence.
When it is remembered that mental capacity is
inherited, that parents of low intelligence generally
produce children of low intelligence and that on
the average they have more children than persons
of high intelligence, and, furthermore, when we
consider that the intellectual capacity or "mental
age" can be changed very little by education we
are in a position to appreciate the very serious
condition which confronts us as a nation..
We have always recognized that the success of
democracy depends upon the intelligence of the
people, but we have never before had any adequate
conception of the very low level of the average
intelligence of the nation. Furthermore, we have
generally assumed that intelligence depended upon
education and that general compulsory education
would solve all our problems. Education is still
one of our greatest needs, but, alas, it is not the
magical panacea that was once supposed. Educa-
tion can only bring to development the qualities
which are potentially present; it cannot increase
those potentialities or capacities; and the attempt
104 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
to educate a person of D grade beyond the fifth
year of the elementary schools is usually wasted
effort.
Undoubtedly the ultimate standing and success
of any popular government must depend upon the
intelligence of its citizens, and yet owing to the
larger families of the unintelligent and to the great
influx of foreigners of low mental capacity, our
average intelligence has probably been declining
for the past twenty-five years at least.
There is some demand, especially on the part of
police authorities, that finger-prints be made of
every person in the nation for purposes of identifi-
cation; how much more desirable it is that every
person be classified mentally ! By this means we
could avoid untold waste of time and effort in
trying to give higher education to those incapable
of profiting by it and in trying to fit the wrong
persons into particular positions. And at the same
time we should greatly increase the happiness and
contentment of the people concerned, for nothing
is so productive of unrest and discontent as the
putting of men and women into positions which
they are incapable of filling, or, worse still, of as-
signing persons of high capacity to low-grade work.
Let us have the finger-prints, but before everything
else let us have a mental classification of all chil-
dren of school age. When once this has been done
perhaps the least intelligent group can ultimately
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 105
be denied the suffrage as are imbeciles, insane,
and criminals at present.
All these things are limitations, adjustments,
balances necessary to make democracy a practical
system of government. Many of them were plainly
expressed and others were implied in the founda-
tions of our government. They are not arbitrary
but necessary limitations of the ideal of universal
liberty and equality. But there are other limita-
tions in modern society which are not absolutely
necessary and some of which are very undesirable,
and there has recently arisen an insistent demand
on the part of great numbers of people for a purer
form of democracy, one in which there will be
a larger degree of liberty and equality than any
the world has ever seen. Does progress lie in the
direction of greater personal liberty and equality?
Is pure democracy a primitive or an advanced stage
in social evolution? Is it the goal toward which
the race is moving or merely a stage through which
it is passing ?
There can be no doubt as to the direction in
which all mankind is moving at present. At the
close of the greatest war in history, a war which we
fondly hoped was fought ' ' to make the world safe
for democracy," a tidal wave of democracy has
covered the whole earth. The most ancient and
powerful autocracies of Europe have gone down in
the wreckage of the war and so-called democra-
106 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
cies have taken their place. The plaintive appeal of
Carl of Austria to Ferdinand of Roumania, "We
kings must stand together now," was a recognition,
when too late, of the conquering forces of democracy
which were released by the war. Democracy is
taking possession of the world not merely in forms
of government but also in the management of
industry, the distribution of property, the purpose
and character of education. It begins to appear
that the world is not only safe for democracy,
but that it is unsafe for anything else.
Our passion for democracy has been with us a
kind of religion; it has rested in the main upon
instinct rather than reason, upon sentiment rather
than science. No one of us would wish to disturb
the firm foundations of our faith, which are laid
in instincts and emotions, and yet it is our privi-
lege and duty to give reasons for the faith that is in
us and to examine the merits and demerits of our
institutions in the light of knowledge and experi-
ence. If democracy is to endure and prevail it
must rest upon science as well as sentiment. Popu-
lar approval or disapproval will not alter the course
of nature and civil laws cannot abolish natural
ones.
In spite of the growth of democracy not a few
thoughtful people are afraid of it and many would
gladly see it limited still further in extent or appli-
cation. Before the war there was apparent in
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 107
this country a growing distrust of democracy,
especially on the part of those who are somewhat
removed from the ranks of the common people;
during the war this distrust was more or less con-
cealed, but now amid the social earthquakes which
are shaking the world this feeling is greatly in-
creased, and we are now witnessing such a conflict
of opinion regarding universal democracy as the
world has never before known.
Distrust of democracy runs through the histories
of all nations, ancient and modern. It was shown
even by the founders of this greatest of democra-
cies in the limitations which were placed upon
citizenship and suffrage and in the many attempts
which were made to guard the highest offices against
popular interference, as, for example, in the consti-
tutional provision for the election of the President
by an electoral college, the election of senators by
State legislatures, and the appointment of judges
by the executive. It appears to-day in the conflicts
between labor and capital, the opposition to wo-
man's suffrage, the fear of popular control of educa-
tion, and the alarm over the spread of socialism
and internationalism throughout the world.
Furthermore, this distrust is increased by the
failures and short-comings of democracy in many
countries where it is being tried, at least nominally.
Alleyne Ireland,* in particular, has recently criti-
* Journal of Heredity, Dec., 1918, and Nov., 1919.
io8 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
cised the whole system of democracy not merely
because of its faults and failures but also because
of its fundamental principles, claiming that it
substitutes the rule of " ignorant masses" for that
of intelligent leaders, and the " blind god of num-
bers" for wisdom and experience. We hear much
of the tyranny, inefficiency, ignorance, and cor-
ruption of democracies and unfortunately much of
this is only too true. Democracy is charged with
being responsible for all these sins, whereas in many
instances they are due to some of the worst types
of autocracy which are merely shielding themselves
under the name of democracy. We do not change
the nature of anything by merely changing its
name and an autocracy, oligarchy, or aristocracy
that calls itself a democracy cannot be used to
disprove the value of real democracy.
Again many of the faults which are charged
up against democracy such as emotionalism, irra-
tionalism, blind partisanship, and selfishness are
found under every other form of social organiza-
tion and cannot properly be attributed to democ-
racy but belong rather to human nature; the most
that can be said of these is that democracy no more
than other systems has been able to eliminate
them.
No system of government lives up to its best
ideals aaid no single system is universally adapted
to all people. No doubt democracy operates best
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 109
with those in whom superior intelligence is asso-
ciated with high morality, in whom the love of
freedom is associated with a compelling desire for
social order and justice. No doubt it is generally
better for parents to govern young children than
to make them absolutely self-governing; no doubt
people of superior intelligence and morality can
govern primitive people more efficiently than they
can govern themselves; no doubt a wise and benefi-
cent autocracy can accomplish many desirable
things which an ignorant and corrupt democracy
cannot. The question which lies back of all this
is, What is the ultimate purpose of government?
In the case of children, is it not to bring them to a
condition where they can wisely govern them-
selves? Is the ultimate purpose different in the
case of primitive peoples, or of the masses in a
democracy? Is not the ultimate aim of govern-
ment the highest possible development of the
individual, the nation, and the race? Is not the
educative power of democracy its greatest virtue?
These great problems of the hour should be
viewed not only in the light of human history, but
also in the long perspective of the history of living
things upon the earth. Undoubtedly the funda-
mental concepts of biology apply to man no less
than to other organisms, but it must be admitted
that the application of biological principles to
specific problems of social organization is often of
no EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
doubtful value. Thus we find that biological
sanction has been claimed for wholly antagonistic
opinions, as, for example, for and against war,
communism, woman's suffrage, polygamy, etc.
Those who are searching for biological analogies to
support almost any preconceived theory in phil-
osophy, sociology, education, or government can
usually find them, for the living world is large
and extraordinarily varied, and almost every possi-
ble human condition has its parallel somewhere
among lower organisms, where we find many kinds
of degeneration as well as progress.
This uncertainty and ambiguity in the applica-
tion of biological principles to man and his insti-
tutions, has brought this whole process of reasoning
into disrepute among those who look upon man
as a being who stands wholly outside the realm
of biology, but in spite of the uncertainties of
biological analogies when applied to minor phases
and problems of human society, no one who has
felt the force and sweep of the great doctrine of
evolution, can doubt that biological principles
underlie the physical, intellectual, and social evolu-
tion of man that biology is a torch-bearer not
merely into the dark backgrounds of human his-
tory, but also into the still more obscure regions
of the future development of the race.
The Declaration of Independence is, in many
respects, the charter of our democracy. Adopted
at a time when it was necessary to secure the ut-
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY in
most co-operation of the Colonies and of the world,
it made its appeal directly to the social instincts,
as well as to the intelligence of men, to their love
of freedom, justice, and equality. The rights of
man have ever been the foundation-stones of de-
mocracy. The Declaration held " these truths to
be self-evident; that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these rights
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to accomplish these purposes, governments
are instituted among men, deriving all their just
powers from the consent of the governed." Here
are the foundation principles of democracy, which
are summarized more concisely in the motto of
France " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."
What is the teaching of biology regarding these
principles of democracy? How can we harmonize
individual liberty and social organization, demo-
cratic equality and hereditary inequality, universal
fraternity, and national and class hostility? Or
to put the question in a more practical form
How can we develop social organization in spite of
individual liberty, democratic equality in spite of
hereditary inequality, universal fraternity in spite
of national and class antagonisms ? These are great
problems, and the student of animal organization
and evolution can do no more than to offer a few
biological suggestions as to their solution.
IV
PERSONAL LIBERTY VS. SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION
WITH the growth of intelligence among animals
and men, responses to external stimuli and to
internal instincts become less immediate and
direct; memories of past experiences come in to
modify or inhibit instinctive responses, and these
responses are no longer as fixed and mechanical
as when instinct acts alone. There thus arises
a certain amount of freedom in behavior; such
freedom is never complete, and is always directly
proportional to the degree of intelligence involved,
and inversely proportional to the strength of the
instincts. The more intelligence one has, the
greater is his freedom from purely instinctive acts,
but man is never wholly free from the influence of
instincts; the greater his rational and volitional
powers, the more complete is his self-determina-
tion, but man is never entirely emancipated from
external compulsions of his physical and social
environment.
The birth and growth of freedom in man has
led to many conflicts between instinct and reason,
between personal desires and the social welfare.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 113
Such conflicts are lacking among individual cells
and other constituent parts of the body as such
fables as that of "the belly and the members"
plainly imply. The perfect integration of the parts
of an organism is the result of organic contact,
especially through the nervous system, of chemical
messengers or hormones which pass from one part
to another, and of simple reflexes or tropisms.
In societies such as those of ants and bees, the
integrating factors are complex reflexes, or chains
of reflexes, which are known as instincts. There
is here so little intelligence and freedom that in-
stinct is the only ruler and harmony is complete.
As Huxley says: "Each bee has its duties and none
has its rights." The incompleteness of integration,
co-operation, and harmony in human society is
due to the fact that imperfect intelligence and
freedom have come in to interfere with instinct.
Disharmony in ourselves, and in society, is the
price we pay for personal intelligence and freedom.
The history of mankind has been one long struggle
for freedom freedom not only from the control
of irrational instincts, but also and chiefly from the
compulsion of outside forces and of other persons.
The eternal struggle against unfavorable environ-
ment, and for the conquest of nature, the battles
for personal freedom in thought, speech, and act,
and for social freedom in religion, government,
and industry, are among the noblest aspirations of
114 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
man. The struggle to be free is part of a great
evolutionary movement, and yet in any society
individual freedom must be limited in the interest
of the common good, and the larger and more
complex the society, the greater must be these
limitations. Here, as, elsewhere, life and evolu-
tion are balanced between opposing principles.
Should the human ideal be individual freedom or
social co-operation, liberty or duty, individualism
or socialism ? It may be granted at once, that both
of these alternatives are desirable, and to a certain
extent attainable, but where one must be sacrificed
for the other, which should it be? Is the ideal
state one in which the social bond is as loose as
possible and individual freedom is the chief aim, or
is it one in which the bond is as close as possible,
and the good of the nation or race or species is
the supreme object?
There can be no question as to the biological
answer. The whole course of evolution from
amoeba to man is marked by increasing differen-
tiation and integration of the constituent parts of
the organism; the whole course of development
from the egg to the adult is a series of progressive
differentiations and integrations of the constitu-
ent cells; the most essential feature of biological
progress consists in the subordination of minor
units to the larger units of organization. In the
relations of organisms to one another, nature
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 115
invariably sacrifices the individual, if it be neces-
sary, for the good of the colony or race or species.
Race preservation and evolution is the supreme
good and all considerations of the individual are
subordinate to this end.
Is it possible that the same rule of progress which
applies all along the way from amoeba to man
is set aside when we come to human society?
Does democracy, as contrasted with autocracy
or aristocracy, mean greater freedom for the indi-
vidual and a looser social organization ? If it does
it would seem, from a biological point of view,
to be doomed to retrogression or extinction, for
it would represent a return toward the protozoan
condition, a process of disorganization and devolu-
tion rather than of progressive organization and
evolution.
Undoubtedly the usual conception of demo-
cratic freedom does involve just this idea of maxi-
mal individual freedom and minimal social control,
but individualism is not a necessary part of democ-
racy, and, when carried to extremes, it ends in
anarchy. In this country we still cling to the ideals
of a pioneer society in which there is little speciali-
zation and co-operation, and great personal free-
dom; indeed, to many persons such a condition
seems the best possible one and the only one con-
sistent with democracy. Such ideals represent a
primitive and not an advanced stage in social
n6 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
evolution. As a people we exalt freedom above
service. Liberty is our national deity; her image
is stamped on our money, her colossal figure is
the first to greet the stranger from other lands.
America is above all else the " sweet land of
liberty."
And yet a change in our conception of liberty
has been coming over the nation; we are finding
that the pioneer ideals of personal liberty and
independence are incompatible with the require-
ments of a populous country and a well organized
society. We still preserve the ancient formulas,
but their content is changing and must continue
to change as society develops. Personal freedom
must be subordinated more and more to social
freedom, and pioneer society must give place to
the more highly organized state in which increasing
specialization and co-operation are the companion
principles of progress.
Lack of specialization is said to be one of the
fatal faults of democracy. Mr. Ireland says*
that in all other affairs of life we demand special-
ists, but "in government we are asked to submit
expert control to the inexpert/' So far as our
particular democracy is concerned, it must be
admitted that too often this charge is true. Our
lack of specialization is reflected in our contempt
for specialists and experts of every sort. The belief
* Loc. cit.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 117
is wide-spread that one man's opinion is as good as
another's, and that expert knowledge is merely
another way of fooling the people.
Every year our State legislatures are flooded
with bills against vaccination and animal experi-
mentation, introduced by provincial Solons who
firmly believe that they know more about these
subjects than men who have devoted their lives
to them. We intrust education to those who can
find no other occupation and who can scarcely
manage to keep one lesson ahead of their classes,
apparently with the idea that any one can teach.
We leave the control of food, fuel, clothing, and
other necessaries of life to speculators and dirty
middlemen, and the health, happiness, and employ-
ment of the people to Providence or to selfish
exploiters. In a democracy where " every citizen
is a king" we assume that statesmanship comes
by nature; almost every citizen thinks that he
could solve complex problems of government,
ranging all the way from parochial affairs to inter-
national relations, better than those who have
devoted years of study to them. We elect dema-
gogues and grafters to political office so frequently
that the very name "politician" has come to be
a reproach. We send narrow partisans to Congress,
and, by stupid adherence to party regularity, men
wholly untrained in statesmanship are frequently
put into the most important public places. It
n8 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
is generally assumed that appointive positions will
go to men who have been successful in winning
votes, and positions requiring great technical
knowledge are often filled by political figureheads
with the suggestion that subordinates can do the
work.
This lack of specialization is seen also in our
systems of education. Nature gives us many types
of individuals, there is abundant opportunity for
specialization, but we do our best by education to
eradicate these differences and to make all citizens
alike. Regardless of inherited capacities or in-
.tended occupations, we attempt to fit all persons
to the same Procrustean bed. The argument
has been advanced against woman's suffrage that
women are different from men, as if all citizens in
the state, all cells in the body, should be exactly
alike. There is arising a new demand for educa-
tion for service, for training for efficiency, and this
demand is sure to increase. Many kinds of citi-
zens are needed to make up a nation, and many
kinds of education are needed for many kinds of
service. How preposterous it is that boys and
girls, laborers and scholars, farmers and merchants
should receive identical training for their varied
services to society. And yet the aim in this has
been a good one; namely, to bring about social
unity and harmony. Again we stand between
opposing forces, again we sail the narrow sea be-
DEVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 119
tween the Scylla of no specialization and the
Charybdis of no co-operation.
These are serious defects in our social system, and
they must be reformed if we are to make progress,
or even to hold our present position; but it should
not be forgotten that as a nation we have only
recently emerged from a pioneer condition in which
there was little specialization and co-operation, and
as a people we are rapidly becoming more highly
specialized without becoming less democratic.
Lack of specialization is no essential part of
democracy. Specialists in all fields of human ac-
tivity are developed in democracies no less than
in other forms of government, and if in selecting
men for public office we still retain some of our
pioneer ideals, this phase of our development is
rapidly passing. No doubt we often make mistakes
in choosing men for public positions, but do other
forms of government avoid such mistakes? In a
democracy these mistakes may be quickly remedied;
when we become sufficiently aroused, "we turn the
rascals out," but it is more difficult to get rid of a
corrupt or incompetent autocrat.
Does democracy mean that every citizen knows
how to govern the country, or wage war, or con-
clude peace, or develop industry, or conserve the
public health, or do a thousand other things which
are necessary in a modern state? Certainly not;
ideal democracy means not less specialization, but
120 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
fuller co-operation than in other forms of govern-
ment. In science, medicine, education, commerce,
industry, agriculture, and innumerable other fields,
we must have specialists, and the same is true of
the various functions of government. The war has
done us a great service in awakening us to this
fact and it will be a crime against civilization and
progress if we allow the nation to settle back once
more into the conditions which prevailed before
the war.
However, candid persons must recognize that
there is abundant justification for the popular
mistrust of certain types of experts. Sad experi-
ence has demonstrated again and again that a man
may know a great deal about some specialty and
still show a lamentable lack of good judgment.
Narrowness of outlook and intense specialization
often make " learned fools." Specialization of this
type is like overspecialization in physical evolu-
tion, it leads to lack of balance and adjustment,
and ultimately to elimination.
Few nations have ever equalled the degree of
specialization shown by the late Imperial German
Government. All citizens, from the Emperor down
to the common soldier, had undergone long train-
ing for their special duties. And yet it is the general
opinion of most people, including the Germans
themselves, that few nations ever made more seri-
ous blunders in policy, diplomacy, and even in
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 121
military operations. These blunders were not in
the technical execution of particular tasks, in
which they were marvellously efficient, but rather
in lack of broad judgment and common sense;
inability to forecast the effects of " Schrecklich-
keit," of unrestricted submarine warfare, of arro-
gant and violent propaganda. All this is evidence
of overspecialization with a corresponding lack of
balance.
We see many evidences of such overspecializa-
tion in our own country theologians who think
they know the whole counsel of God but who have
a very insufficient knowledge of human conditions
and needs; educators who have elaborated mar-
vellous theories but can never make them work;
psychiatrists who can classify the entire popula-
tion under certain types of neuroses or psychoses
but who are themselves striking examples of lack
of balance; specialists in science or medicine or
law, whose overspecialization leads them into the
greatest absurdities. And what are we to con-
clude when specialists differ so fundamentally as do
our x greatest authorities in constitutional govern-
ment and international law on the merits or de-
merits of the League of Nations? The common
people may not know much about this subject,
but they cannot differ more widely than do the
experts.
However, out of all such conflicts of opinion
122 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
there is apt to come in time balance and poise,
just as out of the struggle for physical existence
there comes adjustment and adaptation. It is
not without reason that we call those judgments
which have been reached by multitudes of men as
the result of "trial and error," and finally trial
and success, "common sense," and recognize it
as the highest type of practical judgment.
Our lack of co-operation has been even more evi-
dent than that of specialization. Insistence on
personal freedom and on the rights of individuals
has gone far toward weakening the bonds of union
and destroying co-operation. The disharmonies of
society, and the conflicts of interests and minds and
purposes, have come largely from the exalting of
individual rights over social obligations. We need
a new Revolution which will enforce the duties of
man, as our former Revolution emphasized the
rights of man. How easily the disharmonies of
society could be silenced, and the conflicts between
individuals and classes and nations could be settled,
if men were taught to think more of their duties
and less of their rights. Unquestionably the fur-
ther evolution of society must lie in the direction
of greater co-operation, and any system of organi-
zation which exalts individual freedom to the detri-
ment of social union and harmony must go under
in the struggle for existence.
These very serious defects in our social organiza-
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 123
tion are not so much the results of democracy
as of the character, education, and condition of
the people; the perfection or imperfection of the
social system is a reflection of the popular intelli-
gence and morality. Ignorant and selfish ideals of
democracy, or of any other social system, may lead
astray whole nations and generations, but democ-
racy itself is not responsible for the ignorance,
selfishness, and hate which exist in the world;
rather, these evils have been greatly intensified by
the lack of genuine democracy.
The greatest problem which confronts all types
of government is the problem of social co-operation.
It was the failure of co-operation rather than of
specialization which led to the downfall of almost
every great civilization of the past, and it is this
danger especially which confronts the modern
world. With the increasing size of social units,
specialization does, to a considerable extent, take
care of itself, but co-operation under these condi-
tions tends to grow weaker. Efficient co-operation
may, for a time, be forced upon a people by a power-
ful autocracy, but history has generally shown
that such a course ends in class antagonisms and
the destruction of social union. Self-government
and majority rule are generally recognized as the
best form of government for intelligent people;
a paternal form of government may be better
suited to ignorant and undeveloped races, but only
124 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
with the understanding that the ultimate purpose
of government is the development of the gov-
erned, and that the end and aim of social evolution
is co-operation without compulsion. A genuine
democracy seeks and obtains a degree of co-opera-
tion which compulsion can never obtain.
False ideals of democratic liberty and equality
have done, and are still doing, vast harm in the
world. It is the duty of all who love democracy to
resist these false ideals and to promote those which
are consistent with social progress. Real democratic
freedom is not the freedom of isolation, nor of
anarchy; the liberty for which the peoples of the
world are fighting and dying is not the liberty of
a Robinson Crusoe who is " monarch of all he sur-
veys," nor yet the lawlessness of anarchy and revo-
lution; it is not freedom to plunder or oppress or
dominate others, but the freedom of fellowship,
common service, and mutual esteem; not freedom
from general social control, but freedom from the
tyranny of selfish individuals and classes. Normal
human beings do not desire a kind of freedom like
that of cancer cells, for example, which run riot
without regard to the welfare of the organism,
but rather a freedom like that of the normal cells
of the body, each of which is a unit, preserving its
own individuality, and to a certain extent its own
Independence, and free to do the work for which it
is fitted under the control of the body as a whole.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 125
Men do not desire a freedom like that of the soli-
tary wasp, which lives and works alone, but rather
a freedom like that of ants or bees in a colony
where each individual is free to serve as best it can
under the control of the colony as a whole, or of
what Maeterlinck calls, "the spirit of the hive."
It is a mistake to ascribe monarchical or class ideals
drawn from human society to the ant or bee colony.
The so-called "kings," "queens/' "soldiers," and
"workers" are in no sense rulers or subjects or
favored classes. Each does "what seems good in
his sight," namely the work which it is fitted by
nature to do, and there is no ruler but instinct;
each shares in common prosperity and hardships,
and is esteemed according to its capacity to serve
the common good. Democracy can offer, and
normal human beings can desire, no other freedom
for the individual than this based however on
reason and ethics rather than upon tropisms and
instincts.
But there is a vastly larger and more important
freedom which democracy brings to society as a
whole. The freedom of the individual man is to
that of society as the freedom of a single cell is to
that of the human being. It is this larger freedom of
society, rather than the freedom of the individual,
which democracy offers to the world; free socie-
ties, free states, free nations rather than absolutely
free individuals. In all organisms, and in all social
126 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
organizations, the freedom of the minor units must
be limited in order that the larger unit may achieve
a new and greater freedom; and in social evolution
the freedom of individuals must be merged more
and more into the larger freedom of society. The
liberty which we worship is not, or at least should
not be, that of the individual, but rather that of
society as a whole the freedom of nations and
races rather than that of individuals, the self-
determination of peoples rather than of persons.
This is the biological ideal of freedom, and it should
also be the democratic ideal.
V
DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY VS.
HEREDITARY INEQUALITY
EQUALITY is one of the most important factors
in producing social harmony. It is the dearest
one of the democratic graces. 'And now abide th
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, but the greatest of
these is Equality/ The creed of democracy has
generally been that all men are created equal,
and that the inequalities which exist are due to
environment, education, or opportunity.
And yet nothing is more evident than the ine-
qualities of personality, intelligence, usefulness,
and influence; and the inequalities of heredity
are greater even than those of environment. Re-
cent work on development and evolution shows that
the influence of environment is relatively slight,
that of heredity overwhelming. Not only poets,
but also scholars, statesmen, leaders, and laborers
are born and not made. Hereditary inequality
has always been the strong fortress of aristocracy,
and scientific studies of heredity seem on first
thought to support the contentions of aristocracy
in this respect rather than those of democracy.
How shall we harmonize the teachings of biology
with those of democracy; the proven inequalities
127
128 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
of heredity with the assumed equality of man?
Shall we revise our ideas of heredity, or of democ-
racy? I have sometimes been asked: "Do you
believe in heredity; how then can you believe in
democracy? Do you believe in equality; how
then can you believe in heredity?"
Aristocracy is founded upon an obsolete idea of
heredity, namely the "law of entail." It confuses
social and biological inheritance. A son may in-
herit the property of his father but not his per-
sonality; under the law of primogeniture the oldest
son inherits the kingdom, titles, privileges of his
father in their entirety, but not his intelligence,
character, and personality. In natural or biologi-
cal inheritance the germinal causes of the traits of
the parents are separated and are redistributed to
their offspring so that the latter are "mosaics"
of ancestral traits. These germinal causes of traits,
which are called genes, are transmitted unchanged,
but in the fertilization of the egg one-half of the
genes from each parent is lost and is replaced by
half from the other parent. So numerous are these
genes that the combinations of them in the off-
spring are rarely, if ever, the same in two indi-
viduals, and so complex is their influence upon
one another and upon the process of development,
that no two sexually produced individuals are ever
exactly alike. Consequently the best traits may
appear in parents and be lost in their offspring;
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 129
genius in an ancestor, may be replaced by incompe-
tence, imbecility, or insanity in a descendant. As
each generation must start life anew from the germ
cells, so in every person there is a new distribution
of hereditary factors or genes. Every person has a
new hereditary deal, if not always a square one.
Owing to the fact that some traits, or rather
their genes, are dominant and others recessive,
certain of the latter may be carried along for sev-
eral generations in a latent condition only to appear
in some later offspring in which the dominant gene
is not present. Feeble-mindedness, for example,
is a recessive character, and East has calculated
that it is present in a recessive form in one person
out of fourteen of the entire population of this
country, but it does not actually appear unless two
of these recessive genes come together in a ferti-
lized egg. On the other hand, feeble-mindedness
and other recessive characters become latent when
mated with normal and dominant characters.
The later history of the famous, or rather infamous,
" Jukes family" shows that many of the descen-
dants are normal and useful citizens probably be-
cause their parents married into normal families.
This is the great law of heredity discovered by
Mendel, and it differs fundamentally from the law
of entail. Property may be entailed, but not per-
sonality; titles and privileges, but not character
and ability. With the law of entail in mind, it is
130 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
not surprising that strict hereditarians should have
questioned the reputed parentage of Jesus, or Shake-
speare, or Lincoln, or that lovers of democracy
should have refused to believe in this kind of he-
redity; but the law of entail is of man's making,
while, so far as we know, the law of Mendel is
the only law of natural inheritance.
Think of the great men of unknown lineage, and
the unknown men of great lineage; think of the
close relationship of all persons of the same race;
of the wide distribution of good and bad traits in
the whole population; of incompetence and even
feeble-mindedness in great families, and of genius
and greatness in unknown families, and say whether
natural inheritance supports the claims of aristoc-
racy or of democracy.
When we remember that most of the great lead-
ers of mankind came of humble parents; that many
of the greatest geniuses had the most lowly origin;
that Shakespeare was the son of a bankrupt butcher
and an ignorant woman who could not write her
name, that as a youth he is said to have been
known more for poaching than for scholarship, and
that his acquaintance with the London theatres be-
gan by his holding horses for their patrons; that
Beethoven's mother was a consumptive, the daugh-
ter of a cook, and his father a confirmed drunkard;
that Schubert's father was a peasant by birth and
his mother a domestic servant; that Faraday, per-
haps the greatest scientific discoverer of any age,
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 131
was born over a stable, his father a poor sick black-
smith, his mother an ignorant drudge, and his only
education obtained in selling newspapers on the
streets of London and later in working as appren-
tice to a bookbinder; that the great Pasteur was
the son of a tanner; that Lincoln's parents were
accounted "poor white trash" and his early sur-
roundings and education most unpromising; and
so on through the long list of names in which
democracy glories when we remember these we
may well ask whether aristocracy can show a better
record. The law of entail is aristocratic, but the
law of Mendel is democratic.
Quaint old Thomas Fuller wrote many years ago
in his "Scripture Observations,"
"I find, Lord, the genealogy of my Saviour strangely
checkered with four remarkable changes in four immediate
generations:
1. Roboam begat Abia, that is a bad father a bad son.
2. Abia begat Asa, that is a bad father a good son.
3. Asa begat Josaphat, that is a good father a good son.
4. Josaphat begat Joram, that is a good father a bad son.
I can see, Lord, from hence that my father's piety cannot
be entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see also that
actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news
for my son."
It may be objected that I have ended by deny-
ing that there is any inheritance, at least so far as
intellectual and social qualities are concerned, but
this is not the case. While it is true that good and
bad hereditary traits are widely distributed among
132 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
all classes and conditions of men, they are not
equally distributed. On the contrary the chances of
good or bad traits appearing in offspring are much
higher in some families than in others, but no family
has a monopoly of good or bad traits, and no social
system can afford to ignore the great personages
that appear in obscure families, or to exalt nonenti-
ties to leadership because they belong to great
families. In short, preferment and distinction
should depend upon individual worth and not upon
family name or position. This is orthodox demo-
cratic doctrine, but not the faith or practice of
aristocracy.
Finally democratic equality does not now mean,
and has never in the past meant, that all men are
equal in personality. It is not a denial of personal
inequalities, but is the only genuine recognition of
them. On the other hand, rigid family and class
distinctions are denials of individual distinctions.
Democratic equality does not mean equality of
heredity, environment, education, or possessions;
least of all does it mean equality of intelligence,
usefulness, or influence.
It does mean equality before the law, equal
justice for all, no special privileges due merely to
birth, freedom to find one's work and place in
society. In short it means that every man shall be
measured by his own merits, and not by the merits
of some ancestor whose good traits may have
passed to a collateral line.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 133
Democracy alone permits a natural classification
of men with respect to social value, as contrasted
with all artificial and conventional classifications.
It contributes more than any other system of
government to the contentment, happiness, sta-
bility, and peace of a nation. It brings a message
of justice, and hope, and inspiration to people in
all walks of life. It inspires the youth of a land
with visions and living examples of
". . . Some divinely gifted man
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance
And grapples with his evil star;
And moving up from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope, '
The centre of a world's desire."
This was the passion which fired the souls of our
fathers and led them to establish this great Repub-
lic, and this is the power and inspiration which recall
us at this great crisis in the history of the world
from our artificial aristocracies, and plutocracies,
and class distinctions to a genuine democracy.
VI
UNIVERSAL FRATERNITY VS. NATIONAL
AND CLASS ANTAGONISMS
EVOLUTION shows that we are all cousins if not
brothers. The lines of descent from innumerable
ancestors converge in us, and will radiate from us
to innumerable descendants. Genealogists picture
descent as a tree in which the trunk represents
some single ancestor and the branches all of his
descendants, but such a representation is wholly
at variance with biological facts because in sexual
reproduction every person has two parents. The
" genealogical tree" is the result of an attempt to
trace descent back to some one distinguished
ancestor while ignoring all others. The various
branches of a family do not trace back to a single
trunk, but rather to an increasing number of
branches. A graphic representation of descent
is not a tree but a net in which every individual is
represented by a knot formed by the union of two
lines which may be traced backward and forward
to an ever-increasing number of knots and lines
until all are united in this vast genealogical net of
humanity. If the number of our ancestors doubled
in each ascending generation, as it would do if
134
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 135
the marriage of cousins of various degrees did not
take place, each of us would be descended from
more than a billion ancestors of a thousand years
ago, let us say in the reign of William the Conqueror.
Even allowing for numerous intermarriages of
relatives it is highly probable that all people of
English or French or German stock are descended
from common ancestors of a thousand years ago.
A book * has been published recently in which
several of our Presidents, heads of universities,
and captains of industry and finance are shown to
be descended from Charlemagne. This distinction
is one which they share with probably more than
half of the citizens of this Republic. Einhard,
the contemporary biographer of Charlemagne,
says that he had nine wives, besides many concu-
bines, and although he was fond of his children he
never knew how many he had. If it were possible
to trace our genealogies far enough into the past
and through all their ramifications it would be
found that all of us are literally descendants of
royalty, of Alfred and Charlemagne and William
the Conqueror and of any and every other person
of one thousand or more years ago who left many
descendants including nonentities and worse; we
hunt up our noble ancestors and forget the others.
John G. Saxe, formerly known as the poet of
democracy, once wrote:
* Browning, Charlei R. " Americans of Royal Detcent."
136 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
"Depend upon it, my snobbish friend,
Your family line you can't ascend
Without good reason to apprehend
You'll find it waxed at the farther end
By some plebeian vocation.
Or, worse than that, your boasted line
May end in a loop of stronger twine,
The plague of some worthy relation."
But while our lines of descent lead back to practi-
cally all people of the same race and country of a
thousand or more years ago, we have inherited our
traits of character from only a very small number
of these ancestors. It is known that inheritance
passes from one generation to the next in the germ
cells, and more specifically in the chromosomes or
deeply staining threads found in the nuclei of
those cells.
The number of chromosomes is constant for
every species, and typically each chromosome has
come down in unbroken lineage from previous
generations. But in the formation of the germ
cells one-half of the specific number is thrown away
and when egg and sperm unite the specific number
is again restored.
In man there are probably forty-eight chromo-
somes, twenty-four from the father and twenty-
four from the mother; but these are usually de-
rived in unequal numbers from the four grand-
parents; for example, sixteen may come from the
paternal grandfather and eight from the paternal
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 137
grandmother, four from the maternal grandfather
and twenty from the maternal grandmother, or the
number which comes from each grandparent may
vary all the way from twenty-four to naught.
One or more of the eight great-grandparents may
have furnished no chromosomes and no inherited
traits to the great-grandchild, and finally no one
in the world can inherit chromosomes (or traits)
from more than forty-eight contemporary ancestors,
assuming that the chromosomes preserve their
identity, since no one has more than forty-eight
chromosomes. Consequently, although each of us
has had thousands of ancestors, he has had only a
small number of transmitters.* Many a person
bears the name of some distinguished ancestor but
does not have a single one of his chromosomes or
hereditary traits, whereas others who do not bear
his name, and are usually reckoned as collateral
descendants, have received his chromosomes and
are his true inheritors.
There has been much foolish talk and loose
thinking regarding old families and length of de-
scent. As Tennyson says:
"The gardener Adam and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent."
In length of descent we are all equal, and in com-
* I am indebted to my colleagues, Dean West and Professor
Abbott, for suggesting this word to indicate those ancestors from
whom chromosomes and hereditary traits are derived,
138 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
munity of descent we are all cousins if not brothers.
Our lines stretch out to all our race. Each individ-
ual or family is not a separate and independent
entity, but merely a minor unit in the great organ-
ism of piankind. Biology and the Bible agree that
"God hath made of one blood all nations of men."
There are no really pure lines of human descent,
and few isolated stocks, and these owe their origin
to geographical isolation rather than to anything
else. There has been, and still is, abundant inter-
breeding among all minor varieties and races of
men, and as a result mankind is a hopelessly mon-
grel species. Indeed, in this respect man is like
any other wide-ranging species. He has no such
claim to ancestral purity as has any pure breed
of domesticated animals and plants. Man is indeed
a wild species and cannot be domesticated because
there is no one to domesticate him.
As a result of this common descent the resem-
blances between all types of men are vastly more
numerous and important than the differences.
This fact is especially evident to the biologist, for
even the types which differ most widely, such as
the white, yellow, and black races, are evidently
only varieties or subspecies of Homo sapiens,
while no other existing creature can be placed in
the same zoological genus or family with man.
When I reflect upon the resemblances between all
men and the differences which separate man from
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 139
all other animals, I think I can understand the
words of a prayer which I used to hear when I
was a boy: "We thank thee. Lord, that thou hast
made us men."
Nevertheless, in spite of this universal brother-
hood of man, racial, varietal, national, and class
antagonisms have arisen everywhere and have often
led to terrible hostilities. Racial and varietal differ-
ences represent a natural classification based upon
physical characteristics. There are also undoubt-
edly intellectual and social differences between
these major subdivisions of the species, which tend
to cause a natural and desirable social segrega-
tion of races, but while our instincts lead to such
segregation they do not lead to nor justify racial
antagonisms. The fundamental instincts of all
types of men are so essentially similar that all may,
and often do, live together harmoniously; and the
co-operation of all types of men in organized society
is so much a matter of education and environment
that it has been demonstrated again and again,
and nowhere better than in this country, that
persons of the most distinct races may have the
same social ideals and may co-operate in mutual
helpfulness in the realization of those ideals.
When we come to those minor subdivisions
represented by the so-called races of Europe,
the natural distinctions are usually so slight that
they form no barrier to the most intimate associa-
140 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
tion and co-operation. Most Americans represent
mixtures of English, French, German, Scandina-
vian, and other European stocks and we generally
think that the result is good, not only physically
but also intellectually and socially. The inherent
antagonisms between these stocks that agitators
and designing politicians tell us about are really
not inherent at all, but are largely created, culti-
vated, and magnified by hostile words and deeds
for national and selfish purposes.
Race antagonism is almost always the outgrowth
of ignorance and bigotry, and it is never judicial
or scientific. It is easy to hate and despise people
whom you do not know; perhaps this is'a survival
of an ancient instinct to repel foreigners. On the
other hand, knowledge usually brings sympathy;
"To know all is to pardon all." In any event a
scientific study of different races reveals much that
is admirable and praiseworthy in each, and all who
love the truth will welcome the movement for race-
appreciation begun by scientists and philanthro-
pists in different parts of the world.*
As race antagonisms are generally the result of
bad education, so they may be overcome by good
training. Hope for the peace and progress of the
world must rest largely upon the general cultiva-
tion of a spirit of tolerance and sympathy for other
groups than our own, a realization of the fact
* Means, P. A. "Racial Factors in Democracy," Boston, 1919.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 141
that good as well as bad qualities are found in all
classes, nations, and races, and a spirit of justice
that is willing to recognize and reward good quali-
ties wherever they may be found.
The splendid ideals of personal service and sacri-
fice, and of national and international co-operation,
which attended the World War have now largely
passed away and a spirit of antagonism between
classes, nations, races, and even religions has
spread over the world. Bigotry has taken the place
of sympathy, selfishness of service. This is partly
due to a natural reaction from an unaccustomed
idealism, but in part it is the result of ihe de-
liberate efforts of narrow-minded leaders to cul-
tivate what they euphemistically call class and
race consciousness, nationalism, and patriotism, but
what in reality are class and race hatreds and
national arrogance. The very men who are now
preaching "America first 5 ' were recently damning
those who sang "Deutschland liber Alles." They
are now counselling national selfishness, but at the
same time are loud in their condemnation of labor
unions and Soviets that are showing a similar
spirit of narrowness.
There is only one cure for this sickness of society,
this failure of the democratic ideal of fraternity,
and that is education the cultivation of reason
instead of passion, of co-operation in place of
antagonism, of humanity rather than nationalism.
142 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
Unless these centrifugal tendencies can be over-
come, they will surely lead to the destruction of
our civilization.
But even the end of our civilization need not
mean, and probably would not mean, the end of all
social evolution. Other civilizations would prob-
ably arise on the ruins of ours as ours has succeeded
many others. The teachings of biology and of
human history indicate that further social progress
must lie in the direction of the rational co-opera-
tion of all mankind. Whether our civilization sur-
vives or not, the probabilities are, that sometime
these ideals of rational co-operation and of demo-
cratic fraternity will prevail.
Unfortunately for the present generation of men,
social evolution has not yet advanced to the point
where altruism is stronger than selfishness and
where it is harder to stir up strife than to allay it.
If those only who preach and practise selfishness
were to fall victims to it and those only who take
the sword were to perish by the sword, the elimina-
tion of the antisocial would be more rapid. But
although many innocent ones perish with the guilty,
nevertheless social evolution is moving toward the
elimination of the antisocial. Progress is often
slow and there are many back currents, but the
long view of social evolution and of human his-
tory justifies the hope that there will come a time
when altruism will be stronger than selfishness,
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 143
and democratic fraternity, than national and class
hostility.
The biologist must look with concern upon the
breaking up of European nations into minor inde-
pendent units along lines of language, customs, or
education, just as the intelligent American would
deprecate the breaking up of his own country
along similar lines. Biological and social progress
does not generally lie in that direction, as the course
of evolution clearly shows. In so far as the differ-
ences between peoples are due to environmental
causes, they may be, to a great extent, removed.
The most effective size of governmental units
must vary with the possibilities of integration
and co-operation of the constituent parts, and
these possibilities are favored by homogeneity of
race, language, and education, and by ease of inter-
communication. All of these, except race, are
environmental factors and are to a large extent
subject to social control.
Even when differences are so great that segre-
gation is desirable, it is usually possible to unite
these smaller units into a larger federation, as the
history of this nation has demonstrated. Indeed
this is the only democratic way of counteracting
the social and national disintegration which is so
imminent in parts of Europe to-day. With the
greatly increased facilities for communication and
education which exist in the modern world enor-
144 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
mous national units of federated states are possible,
including as in the case of the British Empire
one-fourth or one-fifth of the entire human species
under one general government, and it does not seem
impossible that the greater part of the other three-
fourths or four-fifths may yet be brought into
some sort of federation. As the union of many
cells into one body, the union of many persons into
one colony, the union of many colonies into one
nation have marked great advances in evolution
so, let us hope, the union of many nations into the
"Parliament of man, the Federation of the world"
will mark the next great step in human progress.
Finally, when we come to those minor class
distinctions which are based only upon occupa-
tion, wealth, or social position we have the most
artificial and unnatural classification of all; and
the antagonisms between these classes, which are
engendered and fomented by designing agitators,
are not only non-instinctive, but they are usually
anti-instinctive and utterly irrational. This is not
to say that men should not associate in congenial
groups which have common interests and ideals;
such associations are natural and inevitable; but
when attempts are made to array one group or
class against another and to make these classes
permanent and hereditary, an artificial disharmony
is introduced into society which can work only
disastrously.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 145
Hereditary social classes such as exist in many
parts of Europe are the antithesis of democracy.
That which is hereditary in such classes is not
necessarily personal merit, but purely environ-
mental advantages or disadvantages. Such arti-
ficial distinctions largely ignore the natural abili-
ties or disabilities of men and are fundamentally
unjust and undemocratic. On the other hand,
classes such as are found in schools, which are
based upon personal merit, and in which every
one is free to pass from ofre class to another de-
pending upon his ability, are not only wholly
democratic, but are absolutely necessary to a well-
organized society.
Means says: "The perfect democracy will be a
state in which there will be classes absolutely
rigid as to their functions for society but abso-
lutely fluid as to the individuals who compose them.
A man's or a woman's position in society will, in
such a state, be determined by his or her peculiar
aptitude and talents, not by hereditary position,
nor by nepotism, nor by human authority, but
solely by individual merit."*
What could be more wasteful, absurd, and tragic
than a system of artificial class distinctions which
condemns low-born genius to the humblest work
and puts well-born blockheads in exalted places?
All persons enjoy most the work which they are
*Loc. cit., p. 158.
146 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
led to believe that they can do best, and that
nation will be most contented and most efficient
whose people are free to find the places in the
sogial system for which they are best fitted. This
is one of the strongest arguments against hereditary
classes, and in favor of a genuine democracy not
that in such a democracy all men are equal, but
that all are free from purely artificial restraints in
finding their own levels. One of the most bene-
ficial influences of the Great War, and of wars in
general, is the breaking up of rigid class distinc-
tions, the elimination of stupid lords and junkers
and military officers, and the elevation of men of
genius to exalted places, irrespective of birth or
social position.
Bateson, the English naturalist, has tentatively
expressed the opinion that hereditary classes are
desirable from the standpoint of eugenics, basing
this opinion no doubt upon the fact that intellec-
tual and social qualities are often, though, as he
sadly admits, not always, characteristic of certain
families. No doubt the best biological and social
results would obtain if intermarriage occurred only
between individuals of similar hereditary types.
Such a segregation takes place naturally and
normally where instinct and inclination are not
interfered with by purely artificial restrictions and
conventions. But even the oldest royal families,
and much more our modern aristocracies and
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 147
pseudo-aristocracies, are of such mixed lineage that
their children vary greatly in ability, and it is
contrary to instinct and to good breeding for a
woman of talent to marry the stupid son of a
distinguished family, or for a man of genius to
marry a shallow-minded heiress. It would be good
for society in general, and for its individual members
in particular, if every person were free to find his
or her proper level both in occupation and mar-
riage, irrespective of family obscurity or pride.
In democratic America we all rejoice when some
divinely gifted rail-splitter becomes by his own
merits the greatest figure of his generation, and
we ought to rejoice, though of course regretfully,
when the ungifted son of a railroad president finds
his proper place working on the track, or when the
low-minded heiress elopes with the coachman.
When we turn from the more personal aspects
of fixed social classes to their control of govern-
ments and of public affairs in general, we find that
the evidence of their disruptive and antisocial
influences are worst of all. The world has had
experience of many kinds of exclusive class rule
absolute monarchy, aristocracy, middle class, and
proletariat and though some of these have proved
better than others, they have all been bad, for they
have endangered or destroyed social unity and
harmony, and have ended sooner or later in dis-
aster. Russia has recently gone from one of these
148 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
extremes to the other, and the end of the tyranny
of the proletariat cannot long be delayed. An
autocracy or aristocracy may be progressive and
efficient, but it is always dangerous, for no person
or class is wise or good enough to rule other classes
or persons without their participation or consent.
Not only do governments derive all their just
powers from the consent of the governed, but they
derive their safety and stability from this source as
well. What a demonstration have the greatest
military autocracies of Europe furnished the world
of their utter weakness and helplessness against an
aroused people !
The strength and stability of democracies are
proportional to their inclusiveness, their breadth
of base, whereas autocracies are inverted pyramids.
Equal universal suffrage and majority rule are the
only self-regulating and self-preserving mechanisms
which have been discovered as yet for harmoniz-
ing conflicting interests in governments; they are
the safety-valves of society. Theoretically, there
is danger that majority rule may end in tyranny
over minorities, but the social instincts of justice
and fair play are wide-spread among men, and ex-
perience has generally shown that in the long run
majorities may be counted upon to be just to
minorities that play fair. The more intelligent
members of society always have an immense ad-
vantage over the more ignorant, and even in a
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 149
genuine democracy the danger is not so much that
ignorant and venal majorities may oppress the
better elements in society, as that intelligent but
unscrupulous minorities may exercise tyranny over
the mass of the people in spite of their numbers.
Majority rule would level society down to gen-
eral mediocrity were it not for the instinct of the
people to follow leaders. Modern democracy is
not the rule of the people as a whole, of ignorant
masses, of "the blind god of numbers." A democ-
racy, no less than an autocracy, is a government by
leaders, but in the former case these leaders are
chosen by the people and are responsible to them
and in the latter they are not. Leaders in a de-
mocracy have great power, and in crises such as
war, their powers may be temporarily greatly in-
creased, but they are not autocrats, for they must
render to the people an account of their steward-
ship. In no modern form of government do the
people as a whole make plans for war or peace,
for taxation or legislation or even party platforms.
These things are determined by leaders, and in
general the mass of the people hold them responsi-
ble only for results. Government, no less than per-
sonal behavior, proceeds by the principle of " trial
and error," and the majority in a democracy decide
only whether the results are failures or successes.
Furthermore a democracy is much more sensitive
to this test than is any other form of government,
ISO EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
for a failure is quickly abandoned and its authors
repudiated. The contrast between democracy and
autocracy is not between "numbers and right-
ness," but it is between rightness as measured by
the effect upon the majority or on only a small
minority of the people.
This necessity for leaders emphasizes the im-
portance of the individual in human society. In
insect societies a single individual counts for little,
except in the case of the queen, upon whom the
reproduction of the colony depends. But in human
society progress, and even survival, depends upon
capable leaders. A leader of incalculable value
may be potential in a boy or girl of humblest birth.
Society should see to it that every individual is
given the chance to bring out the best that is in
him. Hereditary castes of workers, soldiers, kings,
and queens are well adapted to ant societies in
which individual leadership counts for little, but
they are fatal to the highest welfare of human
society where individual leadership is all-impor-
tant.
One of the charges which has been brought
against democracy is that it fails to develop capa-
ble leaders. For example, Cram* says: " Demo-
cratic government for the last twenty-five years
has neither desired nor created leaders of an intel-
* Cram, Ralph Adams. "The Nemesis of Mediocrity," Boston,
1917.
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 151
lectual or moral capacity above that of the general
mass of voters, and when by chance they appear
they are abandoned for a type that is not of the
numerical average but below it, and the standard
has been lowering itself for a genera tion."
Means* quotes this approvingly and points out
that our people are showing a general decay of
morals. He says he has seen, in a certain Eastern
city, "young men and women, who had ancestors
among that splendid group of men who signed the
Declaration of Independence, acting like drunkards
and prostitutes"; and he attributes this lower
tone of morals to "the newcomers whose origin
was in heaven knows what gutter."
Every period has its Jeremiahs, who get joy and
satisfaction from pointing out how much worse this
degenerate age is than the "good old times" of
the past. To some people the sunset of yesterday
was much more beautiful than the sunrise of to-
day, and this is especially true of those who never
get up to see the sun rise. Is there not every reason
to believe that coming generations will look upon
Roosevelt and Wilson as this generation looks upon
the great political leaders of former times? And
as to the moral degeneration of those descendants
of the Signers, is it certain that the young blades
of the Revolutionary period drank less alcohol and
led more chaste lives than those of the present
* Means, loc. tit.
152 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
day? And does it seem probable that these de-
scendants of our first families were led astray by
"gutter-born" immigrants, generally poor, ignorant
and hard-working?
Such condemnations of the present, as compared
with the past, are not critical nor judicious. They
are an expression of emotion rather than reason,
of sentiment rather than evidence. They are
characteristic of those who see in history a record
of deterioration rather than of progress, who place
the golden age in the distant past and engage in
ancestor-worship. But the evidences of social and
moral progress are all about us, and those who
take the long view of human history will not mis-
take marginal eddies for the main stream.
The greatest danger that confronts democracy
is not its lack of specialization, its slowness and in-
efficiency, its levelling down to mediocrity, or its
lack of capable leaders, but the fact that unscrupu-
lous leaders may pervert and misdirect the normal
social instincts of the people in order to accomplish
selfish and partisan purposes. During the war
there was a wide-spread and highly organized culti-
vation of emotions of hate, suspicion, chauvinism.
In some instances leaders, newspapers, and organi-
zations did their best to work the people up to a
frenzy, little realizing or caring how dangerous this
process is. At present a similar^propaganda is being
waged against Japan and Mexico, and unless it
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 153
can be met by reason and common sense it will in
time get beyond peaceful bounds. It is this appeal
of unscrupulous or ignorant leaders to primitive
instincts and emotions rather than to reason which
makes possible blind prejudice and hatred between
classes and races and nations; it is this which
provokes wars and destroys peace and progress.
There are, so far as I can see, but two possible
remedies for this most serious condition, and these
are, first, that leaders shall always be honest and
intelligent, a condition which we can probably
never hope to attain, or, second, that the people as
a whole shall be educated so as to appreciate the
difference between evidence and emotion, science
and sentiment. Sensationalism, emotionalism, irra-
tionalism are the greatest dangers that threaten
democracy and even civilization itself, for they are
a direct return to barbarism, savagery, and pre-
human conditions. Our most dangerous enemies
are within and not without, and they are the
forces of unreason.
In the midst of such a revival of nationalism
and patriotism as the world has rarely experienced,
we ought not to forget that " above all nations is
humanity," that love of man is more fundamental
than love of country; that the only things that
make patriotism glorious are service and sacrifice;
that love of country means more than love of " rocks
and rills" and "templed hills," more even than
1 54 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
love of forms of government; that it means in fact
love of our fellow men, and that patriotism, social
harmony, and the spirit of humanity are grounded
upon democratic fraternity.
CONCLUSION
CAN democracy save itself from the serious faults
and dangers which threaten it? Can the people,
as a whole, be trusted to choose wisely their lead-
ers and policies? Can the democratic ideals of
liberty, equality, and fraternity bring about that
rational co-operation upon which the further prog-
ress of society must depend? No man can now
answer these questions with certainty, but at least
it can be said that no other system of social or-
ganization which has yet been tried holds so much
promise of success.
The rational powers of the masses of mankind
are not very great, and if the success of democracy
depended upon human reason alone the prospect
would not be very encouraging. Although Lin-
coln's saying is true that "You can fool all of the
people some of the time, and some of the people
all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people
all of the time/' nevertheless if a majority of the
people can be fooled most of the time the outlook
for future democracy would not be very bright,
if progress depended solely upon the rational
powers of mankind.
But the firm foundations upon which democracy
rests go deeper than the intellect and reason of
156 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
man; they go down to the instincts and emotions
and moral judgments which underlie all social
evolution. Upon these foundations the rational
organization of society stands as a splendid but
still insecure superstructure.
The moral judgments of men may be no better
than their practical judgments, but judgment
which is founded upon much experience, even if
it be based on so low a level as " trial and error,"
is generally sound. Out of the conflict of opinions
and ideals of multitudes of persons in all walks and
circumstances of life there comes at last a compro-
mise or adjustment which we call "common sense"
and which has the pragmatic quality of viability.
Although we cannot always trust the rational
processes of the people as a whole, it is the creed of
democracy that we can trust their social instincts
and moral judgments. Their instincts of service
and sympathy, and their judgments as to right and
wrong, as to justice and injustice, are the bases upon
which the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity
rest. These instincts and judgments are so deep-
seated and so wide-spread, that they form a firm
foundation for democracy.
All students of mankind have based their hopes
of democracy upon these instincts and judgments,
and no one has expressed this thought more force-
fully than President Wilson. In his address at
Independence Hall on July 4, 1914, he said: "The
EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 157
way to success in this great country, with its fair
judgments, is to show that you are not afraid of
anybody except God and his final verdict. If I
did not believe that, I would not believe in democ-
racy. If I did not believe that, I would not believe
that people can govern themselves. If I did not
believe that the moral judgment would be the last
judgment, the final judgment in the minds of men
as well as the tribunal of God, I could not believe
in popular government. But I do believe these
things, and, therefore, I earnestly believe in the
democracy, not only of America, but of every awak-
ened people that wishes and intends to govern
and control its own affairs." And in his address
to the American Bar Association on October 20,
1914, he said: "You cannot go any faster than you
can advance the average moral judgments of the
mass; but you can go at least as fast as that, and
you can see to it that you do not lag behind the
average moral judgments of the mass. I have in
my life dealt with all sorts and conditions of men,
and I have found that the flame of moral judgment
burned just as bright in the man of humble life
and limited experience as in the scholar and the
man of affairs." Upon these instincts and judg-
ments which are deeply planted in the nature and
heart of humankind rest the present successes and
the future hopes of democracy.
These, then, are some of the reasons why we love
158 EVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY
democracy and are willing to defend it against the
pretensions of autocracy: because it is the most
natural and reasonable, because it is the most
free and just, because it is the most humane and
peaceful system of government which has yet been
tried by man.
Ill
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
THE NATURE OF RELIGION
SCIENCE contributes to society knowledge and
power; government establishes order and justice;
religion cultivates faith, hope, and love. The ap-
peal of science is chiefly to reason, of government to
action, of religion to emotion. The instincts and
emotions of men are older and more powerful than
their reason and correspondingly the appeal to
emotion is more potent than the appeal to reason.
Indeed, reason itself can be appealed to only
through intellectual feeling or desire for truth.
The highest types of religion appeal to the love
of truth, of beauty, and of goodness, that is, to the
noblest emotions in human nature.
Ryland says: " Thoughtful people get too much
in the habit of thinking that intellect is every-
thing. Yet the world is governed not by thought
but by emotion." And on this subject Ribot, the
French psychologist, says: "What is fundamental
in character is the instincts, impulses, desires,
feelings, all these and nothing else." "Men are
not governed by abstract principles/' said Leslie
Stephen, "but by passions and emotions." Her-
bert Spencer said, "Mind is not wholly, or even
maihly intelligence; it consists largely and in one
161
162 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
sense entirely of feelings "; and August Comte said:
"Affections, propensities, passions are the great
springs of human life."
This is the great truth which religion has ever
emphasized: out of the heart, that is, the emotions,
are the issues of life (Prov. 4: 20) ; As a man thinketh
in his heart, so is he (Prov. 23:7). This moral
and emotional part of man's nature, as contrasted
with his mind or intellect, is what is usually called
the soul.
In general instincts and feelings are as perfect in
the higher orders of animals as in man; emotions
and desires have an intellectual component and
consequently are limited to the highest animals
and are most highly developed in man; reason
alone, that is, the power of generalization and, ab-
stract thought, is wholly limited to man.
A. COSMIC MYSTERIES
Reason and consciousness have disclosed to man
a vast and mysterious universe, in which there are
stupendous forces and processes which he but dimly
apprehends and the meaning and purpose of which
he cannot understand. In this vast universe in-
dividual men, the whole human race, the earth
and solar system are but atoms and motes float-
ing in infinite space. Generations, ages, eras come
and go; living, feeling creatures rejoicing in their
strength and fond of life swarm over the arth
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 163
and go down to inevitable death and extinction,
leaving only their skeletons as memorials of them;
human beings, fearfully and wonderfully made,
gifted with intelligence and reason, with the keen-
est love of life, fear of death, and highest hopes
and aspirations, appear by millions, rejoice and
struggle and suffer for a brief period and then die
and leave only their bones and implements behind.
The inexorable system of nature seems to move on
like a colossal Juggernaut, unheeding the victims
that lie in its path. Complex forms of society
tribes and states and great empires arise, flourish
for a period, and then decay and disappear, leaving
only vast monuments as evidences of their great-
ness and pride and power.
In the midst of this incomprehensible universe,
in the presence of these illimitable powers and
inexorable laws of nature, in the onrush of this
universal holocaust puny man stands bewildered
and wonders what it all means.
B. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Reason and consciousness have also revealed to
man alone a vast problem of evil. Animals are
not tortured with mental and moral suffering and
they live chiefly in the present without fear as
to the future or remorse for the past. Man on
the other hand has eaten of the fruit of the tree
of die knowledge of good and evil. He suffers
164 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
not merely from physical pain but much more
from mental and moral anguish. Through his
memory, imagination, and reason he lives not mere-
ly in the present, but also in the past and future.
And although this larger life increases his joys it
multiplies his woes. Burns has immortalized this
difference between animals and men in his poem
"To a Mouse":
" Still thou art blest, compared wi' me !
The present only toucheth thee:
But, och ! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear !
And forward, though I canna see,
I guess and fear."
Who will say that those greatest and most dis-
tinctive of human traits, reason and consciousness,
have not been purchased at a fearful price ? They
have revealed a world of evil as well as of good
a world of struggle and failure, of suffering and
sorrow, of injustice and selfishness, of disappoint-
ment and despair a world of war and pesti-
lence and death; a world in which the innocent
suffer as well as the guilty, in which unborn babes
suffer for the sins of their fathers, in which evil is
often rewarded and good punished; a world in
which nature is "Red in tooth and claw with ra-
vine," in which diseases and parasites of the most
devilish ingenuity prey upon all living things, in
which all higher animals are born in pain, brought
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 165
up with measureless care and trouble, live a life
in which struggle and suffering are mingled with
brief satisfactions and joys, and without a single
exception go on to inevitable decay and death.
And as if these natural and unavoidable evils
were not enough, man has taken what seems to be
an almost infernal delight in perpetrating and
imagining others. He has outdone the brutes in
brutality and the beasts in bestiality. He has in-
vented more cruel tortures and has imagined worse
horrors than any known in nature. In his igno-
rance and superstition he has peopled the world
with demons, evil spirits, and witches, and he has
extended these imaginary horrors to a future life
of eternal torture.
Is it any wonder that sensitive souls who have
brooded over these horrors have cried out against
them, that they have found this world of evil
intolerable and have been compelled to seek some
way of relief?
C. THE INNER CONFLICT
Furthermore, we are aware of the fact that
disharmony and evil are not only around us but
in us. We are urged to different courses by con-
flicting desires. Hate battles with love, selfishness
with altruism, passion with reason. The moral
and social codes forbid many things which we de-
sire^and prescribe things we would avoid.
i66 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
"Huxley held that the spirit of ethics was opposed to the
spirit of evolution. Metchnikoff finds these disharmonies
due to the survival of bestial instincts in man. Galton
finds the sense of sin to be due to the fact that the develop-
ment of our inherited nature has not kept pace with the
development of our moral civilization. Our psychical, so-
cial, and moral environment has come down to us from the
past with ever-increasing increments, every age standing
on the shoulders of the preceding one. The aspirations,
impulses, responsibilities of modern life have become enor-
mous and our inherited natures and abilities have not essen-
tially improved. Social heredity has outrun germinal hered-
ity and the intellectual, social, and moral responsibilities of
our times are too great for many men. Civilization is a
strenuous affair, with impulses and compulsions which are
difficult for the primitive man to fulfil, and many of us are
hereditarily primitive men. The frequent result is dishar-
mony, poor adjustment, a struggle between primitive in-
stincts and high ideals with a resulting sense of discourage-
ment and defeat, which often ends in abnormal states of
mind. The prevalence of crime, alcoholism, depravity, and
insanity is an ever-increasing protest and menace of weak
men against high civilization." *
In memorable words Paul describes the "law in
my members warring against the law of my mind
and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin
which is in my members," and he cries out: "Oh,
wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver me
from this body of death?" (Romans 7:23, 24.)
D. THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION
All men everywhere have desired to be in har-
mony with the superhuman powers and processes
* Conklin. "Heredity and Environment," 1920, pp. 242^243.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 167
which surround them; they have tried to avoid
pain and evil and to find happiness; they have
sought inner peace in place of conflict. In addi-
tion to this, intelligent men have sought for a
rational explanation of these great mysteries and
problems which would satisfy their reason, and
harmonize their emotions ; which would make them
feel at one with cosmic processes, with society,
and with themselves. They have sought, in short,
to adjust or adapt themselves to their environment
whether it be the personal environment, inner or
outer, or the cosmos.
The most intelligent types of men may find
relief from " Fightings within and fears without,"
in science or philosophy, but the great mass of
mankind in all ages and countries have found re-
lief in religion. Religion enables thoughtful and
sensitive persons to face evil, fears, suffering, and
death with hope and courage. It covers the hide-
ous aspects of nature with the mantle of divine
love and purpose. It makes life tolerable to those
who would find it otherwise intolerable. It helps
to control the antisocial and brutish instincts of
men and it cultivates faith, hope, and love. Its
great hold on the race is due to the fact that it
ministers in the highest sense to human comfort
and happiness.
The scientist worships truth, the artist beauty,
and, every moral person goodness. Religion com-
1 68 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
bines the worship of the true, the beautiful, and
the good. The person who loves these is religious,
it matters not what his professed creed may be.
The irreligious man is the one who does not love
the true, the beautiful, and the good even though
he may profess a noble faith and may breathe out
threatenings and slaughter against those who differ
from him.
The great power of religion in every stage of
human history bears witness to the fact that life
is not merely thinking and doing, but feeling also,
and that religion answers to a real human need.
We shall never outgrow our need of religion, as we
shall never outgrow our need of government and
science, though we have outgrown many faiths and
creeds in science and government, as well as in
religion, and shall probably outgrow many more.
II
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
As the study of comparative anatomy and embry-
ology must inevitably have led to the doctrine of
organic evolution, so the study of comparative
religions must necessarily have led to a recognition
of the fact of religious evolution. In this country
at least, the wide recognition of the fact that there
is much in common and much of value in all re-
ligions dates from the World's Parliament of Re-
ligions in 1893. Those who were then and there
stimulated to study other religions came to see
that many fundamental doctrines of Christianity
go back to remote sources.
It is not my purpose here to discuss in any
detail the evolution of religion. This is a subject
which has been dealt with by some of the greatest
students of world religions who have shown that
religion, no less than social organization and human
intelligence, has undergone an evolution from the
primitive beliefs and practices of savage tribes to
the lofty teachings and ideals of Christianity.
This evolution is nowhere better illustrated than
in the Old and New Testaments, where the record
of the religious development of the Jews is traced
froyi the primitive faith and customs of
169
170 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
barbarous tribes to the highest ideals of religion
and morality that the world has ever known.
Buckle thought that intellect is the great mov-
ing force of history and that emotions are static.
Certain it is that emotions and instincts are far
more static than knowledge, just as physical in-
heritance and evolution are more static than so-
cial inheritance and evolution. When one consid-
ers the utter anachronism presented by the sur-
vival of primitive or even savage ideals of reli-
gion, not only in an age of general enlightenment
but even in persons of high intelligence and culture,
it is only too easy to believe with Buckle that emo-
tions and religion are static. When one reflects
on the fact that for nineteen centuries so great a
part of the world that professes to be Christian
has remained heathen at heart and that to-day the
teachings of Jesus are generally regarded by his
so-called followers as too lofty to be practical we
may well wonder whether mankind is making any
progress in religion. Erasmus gave the ignorant,
emotional religion of his day only fifty years before
it should become extinct; Voltaire thought that
for all intelligent persons the old religion was al-
ready extinct; but in spite of notable advances in
education, general information, and social organi-
zation the " old- time religion" of emotion as op-
posed to reason, of dogma rather than of works,
still persists.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 171
*
But emotions and religions, like physical organi-
zation and instincts, do undergo slow changes in
the course of centuries. The long view shows that
here also there has been evolution and progress.
If there has been an evolution of intellect and of
society, it follows necessarily that there has been
evolution in man's conception of religion, for even
if the doctrines and commands of all religions were
supernaturally revealed, those revelations must
have been adjusted to the stage of evolution to
which men had arrived. In his address on Mars'
Hill in Athens, Paul clearly outlined this develop-
ment of religion from fetichism and idolatry to
the worship of "Him in whom we live and move
and have our being." (Acts 17:22-31.)
Primitive religions are almost entirely emotional
and are based largely upon fear. Goethe described
primitive religion as "fear without reverence."
In the lowest grades of savagery the object of
worship is some external thing. Family or tribal
gods are identified with animate or inanimate
objects which are the possession of the tribe.
These fetiches are cherished and treated with cere-
monies in order to bring good luck. In a slightly
more advanced state of savagery the external ob-
ject is the symbol of the god rather than the god
himself; it is the "idol," which means the thing
seen, and stands for the unseen god.
savage worships this idol or the god sym-
172 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
bolized by it and makes sacrifices to it in order to
propitiate it and to get it to fight for him and to
do his will. Even in modern religions there is a
large element of fetichism, as witness the adoration
of wax figures, bones of saints, sacred relics, and
the like. The fact is that many members of civi-
lized society are, intellectually and morally, still
savages and their religion is still fetichism. Caird*
says: "The spirit of fetichism is the dark shadow
which accompanies religion in every stage, from
the savage who makes presents to the medicine-
man of his tribe up to the Christian who prays,
not that God's will may be done, but that God
may be got to do his will."
Family and tribal gods were believed to be the
ancestors of the tribe, even though they were
animals or inanimate objects, and the tribe was
frequently named from its tutelary deity and was
supposed to partake of his nature. These deities
fought and wrought for the good of their tribes
and against all enemies. Survivals of such beliefs
may sometimes be found even in modern nations,
as, for example, in the recent war-time invocations
to "Our good old German God."
A higher type of religion rising above belief in
tribal gods is found in the worship of the heavenly
bodies and of the elemental powers of earth and
* Caird, Edw. "The Evolution of Religion," Glasgow, 1893, vol.
I, p. 225.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 173
sky and sea. This is one of the earliest types of
religion of civilized and semi-civilized nations of
Egypt, Assyria, Greece, India, Persia, China, Peru,
and Mexico. Whereas the idea of tribal gods
led to belief in multitudes of minor deities, the
worship of nature, and especially of the heavens,
tended to reduce the number of these deities.
"The physical universalism of the heavens . . .
is thus the first form in which the idea of a universal
God, a God who is above, though not as yet exclu-
sive of all others, presents itself to the spirit of
man. . . . The physical universality of the heav-
ens was the stepping-stone upon which the religious
mind of India rose to the abstract universality of
thought, the Absolute Being in which everything
else is lost. This pantheism is the final outcome of
polytheism, the fatal gulf that must ultimately
swallow up all merely objective religions." *
A still more advanced type of religion is found
in anthropomorphism or homotheism, in which the
object of worship is a greater and more perfect
man. This is a recognition of the fact that^the mind
and soul of man are the highest and most worthy
objects in nature, that they far surpass in com-
plexity and significance the most stupendous phe-
nomena of the material world. There is thus a
reason for the fact that in endeavoring to endow
his gods with the highest and noblest qualities
< * Caird, loc. cit., pp. 255-258.
174 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
man should have made them in his own image.
Owing to the difficulty of imagining the combina-
tion of the superlative manifestations of all human
qualities in one object of worship, these qualities
were distributed among many gods, and thus we
get the numerous anthropomorphic gods of Egypt,
Assyria, Greece, and Rome.
Finally the external objects of worship, whether
fetiches, idols, forces of nature, or gods in human
form, are abandoned for a subjective religion of
thought. The material object is sublimated and
etherealized; the forces of nature and the aspira-
tions of man are combined in a universal and
eternal spirit, all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good.
And yet this sublimated idea of God combines the
best elements of earlier and more primitive re-
ligions, for religious systems, like scientific or gov-
ernmental ones, evolve by absorbing, recombining,
and elaborating earlier forms and ideas.
An element of ethics or morality is found in all
religions, even the most primitive, but it becomes
a leading principle in only the most advanced types
of religion. It is sometimes said that ethics is
entirely lacking in primitive religions and yet this
is not strictly true, for although the family or tribal
god may be a demon to other tribes, he is the pa-
tron and protector of his own particular tribe.
There is ethics in such a religion, but it is a small
and narrow kind of ethics, and only in the course
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 175
of long evolution has it grown to include other
tribes and races and nations; and correspondingly
it was only in the course of long development that
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob came to be
regarded as the Lord of all the earth and the Father
of all mankind. " Religion," said Matthew Arnold,
"if we follow the intention of human thought and
human language in the use of the word, is ethics
heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the pas-
sage from morality to religion is made when to
morality is applied emotion." The evolutionary
view of religion would reverse the process here de-
scribed and teach that to the emotions of primitive
religion there was in course of time added ethics
and morality.
The fact of the evolution of religion is held by
some to destroy its value and significance, but one
might as well hold that the development of the
individual destroys the value of personality or
that the evolution of man destroys his unique
superiority over all other creatures. The signifi-
cant fact with regard to the race, personality, or
religion is not what they begin with but what they
lead to and what they end with. All forms of de-
velopment are marvellous, miraculous if you please,
but they are none the less facts. From the minute
and relatively simple egg cell develops the com-
plex body, the instincts, and the mind of man;
from .primitive protoplasm has developed all the
176 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
multitudes of living things which inhabit the globe,
including man, the paragon of animals, the climax of
evolution ; from the earliest forms of society, namely
the family and tribe, have developed all the com-
plexities of modern civilization; from the primi-
tive faith of the child or the savage has developed
the highest type of religion and ethics that the
world has ever known. Such development is a fact
which cannot be successfully denied; but though
we may recognize its steps and stages, we cannot
fully explain its causes. The mystery of mysteries
is how the egg cell or the original protoplasm
or savage society or primitive religion came to
contain all the marvellous potencies of develop-
ment which they possess.
The various stages and phases of religion repre-
sent different attitudes of mind toward the funda-
mental problems of existence, such as the origin
and government of the universe, the constitution
and order of nature, the origin and character of man
and of society, and especially the mysteries of hu-
man life and death, of good and evil, of instincts,
emotions, intelligence, and consciousness, as well
as the aspirations and ideals of individuals and of
society. The type of religion which one holds is
the reflection of his beliefs regarding these funda-
mental things. Caird* says, "A man's religion is
the expression of his ultimate attitude to the uni-
* Caird, loc. cit. t p. 30.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 177
verse, the summed-up meaning and purport of his
whole consciousness of things. ... In short it is
the highest form of his consciousness of himself in
his relation to all other things and beings; and if
we want a brief abstract and epitome of the man,
we must seek for it here or no where. "
In this sense religion is a personal matter; every
man has his own religion, however irreligious it
may seem to those whose attitude to the universe
is different from his own. In this broadest sense
religion includes a man's entire personality, his
intellect, emotions, will; his thoughts, aspirations,
activities.
But in religion, as in everything else, mankind
has desired uniformity. A purely personal religion
may be good enough theoretically, but practically
it fails to accomplish much of a lasting nature for
human society. Because of the greater power and
permanency of society, as contrasted with the indi-
vidual, all types of religions have established or-
ganizations, such as churches, schools, charitable
institutions, even governments; and they have
developed bodies of belief such as doctrines, dog-
mas, and creeds.
Ill
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THEOLOGY
AND SCIENCE
BETWEEN religion and science there can be no
other conflict than such as may arise between
emotion and reason, between faith and knowledge.
But between the science which deals with reli-
gion, namely theology, and the sciences which deal
with various aspects of nature, that is, the natural
sciences, there have been many conflicts. When
one considers all types of religion and theology,
it is evident that there have been many conflicts
not only between these religious systems and sci-
ence, but also between them and the highest types
of art and morality. However, we are here con-
cerned primarily with the conflicts between natu-
ral science, and especially biological science, and
Christian theology.
In the interests of uniformity of belief religious
bodies have prescribed many intellectual, scien-
tific, and philosophic systems and have claimed for
them divine sanction and revelation, whereas all
other knowledge might grow from more to more,
such revealed knowledge was held to be perfect
from the first, and where it came into conflict with
science, so much the worse for science.
178
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 179
But so far as scientific doctrines are concerned
no sane person now attempts to prove or disprove
them by appealing to theology or the Scriptures;
they stand or fall on scientific evidence only.
Religious philosophy, on the other hand, is based
chiefly on human needs and desires and here even
more than elsewhere the tendency is to believe
that which one desires to believe, and to adopt a
faith which will satisfy the emotions but which may
not satisfy the reason. And yet religious philosophy
to be of any comfort or value must be sincerely
believed. It must satisfy the reason as well as the
emotions, and to this extent it must be consistent
with one's knowledge of nature and of man. Con-
sequently religious beliefs and doctrines cannot
stand still when all other knowledge is advancing.
The faith of childhood or of the childhood age of
the race will not satisfy more mature stages of
development, and it would be strange if the the-
ology of a pre-scientific age did not now and again
clash with advancing knowledge.
Almost all general ideas are expressed in terms
of sense impressions; they are material pictures
or images which in the course of time have come to
stand for, or to symbolize, some more immaterial
concept. This is true of all our thinking, but it
is especially true in the field of religion. Religious
thinking, expression, and instruction is almost en-
tirely in the form of symbols. Much of our Ian-
i8o EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
guage on this subject is symbolic, as, for example,
"spirit" meaning breath or wind, "heaven" mean-
ing that which is elevated, etc., and practically
all of the forms, ceremonies, and ordinances of
religion are symbols. The presentation of spiritual
thoughts to immature minds must be in the form
of sensory objects, and especially of visual images.
Hence God, the spirit of truth and beauty and
goodness, becomes the "Good Man," the general
spirit of evil becomes the "Bad Man," heaven
becomes the Celestial City with streets of gold and
gates of pearl, etc. To insist that these and many
other religious symbols, metaphors, or allegories
shall be accepted by mature minds as real, material
entities rather than as symbols is like requiring
grown-up people to "believe in Santa Claus" as a
real, physical personality rather than as a symbol
of the spirit of Christmas the spirit of good-will
and service and love. The symbolism of religion
is wonderfully rich and deep, and it is capable of
appealing to all grades of intelligence and experi-
ence from the child to the sage. On the other hand,
a literal interpretation of these symbols is not only
impossible for mature minds but it destroys their
deeper meaning. "The letter killeth, the spirit
maketh alive." More than anything else, it is
extreme literalism in the interpretation of religious
symbols which has caused the conflict ^between
science and religion.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 181
It is not possible to quiet this conflict by " taking
the reason captive/' as has sometimes been advised,
nor is it possible to save an outgrown theology
by stopping the advance of science or by discredit-
ing its conclusions. It is not possible to satisfy
mature minds with a primitive religion suited only
to children, and the attempt to do this can only
result in forcing thoughtful persons into an atti-
tude of hostility to religion. The modern world
has outgrown the primitive religions of tribal
gods whether those of the Philistines or the Israel-
ites; it has outgrown the idea of national gods
whether of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, or
America; it has outgrown the cosmogonies of the
Babylonians and the science of the earliest stages
of civilization, and it is just as impossible to force
the modern mind back into these primitive beliefs
as it would be to force the mature man back into
the egg from which he developed.
Much harm has come to religion through pious
attempts to oppose the advance of science by
unscientific methods. Through many dark ages
the Christian church served as the intellectual
as well as the spiritual guide of men and it is not
surprising that with the dawn of a brighter era
it should still have striven by its old methods to
maintain its intellectual leadership; but the time
has forever passed when scientific questions can be
settled by an appeal to theology. The world no
182 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
longer looks to the church, as it once did, for
intellectual leadership. The time was when not
only the pulpit but also the great seats of learning
were the schools of the church. To-day we hear
much of the loss of influence on the part of the
pulpit and it is notorious that in the great universi-
ties the church has lost control. The remedy for
this condition is not to be found in increased zeal
but in increased wisdom. Why should the church
claim for itself authority in matters of science?
If false doctrines are taught by science, and no
doubt many are, science will furnish the cure.
The only remedy will be found in more exact meth-
ods of inquiry, in more laborious investigations;
it can never come through resolutions of church
councils, general assemblies, or even papal anathe-
mas.
It is the duty of the church to relate itself to
present-day problems, to present-day methods, and
knowledge, but it is not its duty to become spon-
sor for scientific doctrines. It is as certainly a
mistake for the church to stake everything upon
the latest doctrine of science as upon the oldest
though not so fatal a mistake. The advice of
Gamaliel is still good advice: "Jlefram from these
men and let them alone: for if this counsel or this
work be of men, it will come to naught: but if it
be of God ye cannot overthrow it: lest haply
ye be found to fight against God." The logjc of
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 183
events will try all doctrines; natural selection will
ultimately weed out the unfit in science and re-
ligion, as well as in the physical, intellectual, and
social worlds.
It is the truth after all which all sincere men
desire. God cannot be concerned that men should
believe anything which will not bear the most
searching investigation, and why should those who
claim to be his ambassadors be fearful of this test?
The truth is more to be desired than any form of
doctrine or dogma. In all science the great article
of faith is this, " Truth is mighty and will prevail."
We may be sure of the ultimate triumph of the
truth, whatever may become of your doctrine or
mine; and further we may rest assured that there
is no short cut to truth, no royal road, no way to
save men from temporary error. "Prove all things,
hold fast that which is good" is the only rule.
This being so, the one fatal thing is not error but
bigotry, not smallness of knowledge but small-
ness of will and purpose and soul, not disbelief in
doctrine but distrust of truth and reason and na-
ture. In short the one thing to be desired by
church and state, by society and individuals is
not perfect truth nor a panacea for all human ills
but openmindedness, sincerity, and sanity.
Strictly speaking, science and religion deal with
different subjects. The substance and purpose of
sciejice is knowledge; of religion, faith and con-
184 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
duct; the organ of science is primarily the intellect,
of religion the emotions and the will; the goal of
science is mechanism, of religion spirit. And yet
as man himself is a unity and cannot in reality be
divided into body, mind, and soul, so science and
religion are, or should be, expressions of this unity
acting in co-operation and not in antagonism:
"Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster."
IV
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL
THE centre of the conflict between science and
theology is naturalism vs. supernaturalism. Al-
most every religion claims to have had a super-
natural origin, to have been made known to men
by supernatural revelation, to be attested by super-
natural miracles, to influence the lives of men in a
supernatural manner and to lead to supernatural
rewards or punishments in a future supernatural
life. On the other hand, science has found that so
many things which were once regarded as super-
natural are due to natural causes that it assumes
that all phenomena will ultimately be found to be
natural, either by showing that they can be ex-
plained by laws or principles already known or by
other laws at present unknown and perhaps un-
suspected.
Professor W. K. Brooks once said, "The idea of
the supernatural is due to a misunderstanding; na-
ture is everything that is."* It is worth our while
to consider briefly what is meant by these terms, for
the conflict between science and religion is caused
* William Keith Brooks Memorial Meeting, Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Circulars, 1909.
.85
186 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
largely by this misunderstanding. Bishop Butler
in his "Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion "
defines natural as "that which is stated, fixed,
settled," and Charles Darwin put this quotation
from Butler opposite the title-page of his book "On
the Origin of Species." The supernatural is that
which is either opposed to nature in that it is not
stated, fixed, settled, and hence is capricious or ac-
cidental, or it also is natural, though we may not
at present recognize the order, system, and laws
which lie back of it*
A. POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS OF NATURE
AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Many things were once supposed to be due to
supernatural causes which are now known to be
wholly natural. Primitive conceptions of the uni-
verse represented everything as supernatural in the
sense of being due to the will or caprice of the
gods. The most regular and usual happenings
such as the course of the sun through the sky, the
rising and setting of sun and moon and stars, the
winds and waves, thunder and lightning and storm
were the direct acts of certain deities. And much
more were extraordinary happenings, like earth-
quakes, volcanic eruptions, comets, eclipses, and
floods, attributed to the anger of the gods. How-
ever, such phenomena were in time shown to be
the natural results of natural causes, and intelli-
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 187
gent persons no longer regard them as super-
natural though they inspire awe and reverence as
much as they ever did.
No one now maintains that such phenomena in
the inanimate world are supernatural, but the
universality of law and system in the living world
is not so generally admitted. In particular the
psychic phenomena of animals and especially of
man have appeared to be more than natural. The
usefulness and fitness of many instincts and emo-
tions, the truly marvellous qualities of memory and
intelligence, the freedom and power of the will have
long seemed to prove that the mind and soul are
supernatural. And yet psychology reveals the fact
that the mind no less than the body is subject
to natural laws, and that our thoughts and wills
and emotions are not as free and capricious as we
sometimes think, but that they also are ordered
and natural.
We are conscious of the fact that we can by tak-
ing thought modify our behavior; we can choose
to do or not to do certain things and under strong
stimulus we can force ourselves to do such extraor-
dinary things that the belief has arisen that the
will is absolutely free; that it is an uncaused cause,
which stands apart from and outside of nature.
But careful examination shows that this belief is
untenable and untrue. We know that in many
cases our choices are determined by causes, such
i88 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
as instincts, emotions, experiences, thoughts, exam-
ples, admonitions, ideals; and in all cases a study
of our own behavior, as well as that of others,
shows that our acts are never uncaused. Our acts
and choices are determined by many causes, some
of which are external and others internal; they are
not absolutely fixed but are more or less plastic;
they are not lawless and causeless, but, on the
other hand, they are not rigidly prescribed; they
illustrate scientific determinism but not fatalistic
predeterminism.* The fact that a science of psy-
chology is possible proves that there are princi-
ples or laws in the psychical as well as in the physi-
cal world, and that in this sense mind and soul are
natural and not supernatural.
But even if the phenomena of the living world
are not supernatural they are so complex and won-
derful that some philosophers maintain that they
are not capable of being explained as the results
of mechanistic natural causes. Consequently they
maintain that life must include some undefined and
inexplicable energy or entity such as vital force or
entelechy, which if not supernatural, is at least not
mechanistic or casual in its action. They main-
tain that mechanistic explanations of life are never
complete, whether with regard to ordinary physi-
ology and development, or to regulation and re-
generation after injury, or to animal behavior and
*See Conklin, "Heredity and Environment," chap VI,
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 189
evolution. In all of these processes living things
act as if they were guided by intelligent purpose,
or as if the end were in view from the beginning.
However, a detailed and experimental study of
many of these vital activities shows that useful and
apparently purposive actions are the outcome of
the elimination of many useless responses and the
preservation and continuance of useful ones, and
experimental biologists are well-nigh unanimous in
the opinion that the phenomena of the living world
no less than those of inanimate nature are not only
natural but that they are also causal and mecha-
nistic.
However no scientific or mechanistic explanation
of anything is ever complete. No one can explain
the properties of water by its chemical composi-
tion, and yet we have reason to believe that those
properties are indissolubly associated with that
composition; no one can completely explain any
function of a living thing in terms of its structure,
or any structure in terms of function, and yet we
know that they are invariably associated. The
fact is that structure and function, body and mind,
brain and consciousness appear to be two aspects
of one thing namely, organization or life and
neither can be fully explained in terms of the other.
In the union of chemical elements properties ap-
pear which could never have been predicted from
the properties of the elements, as, for example, in
igo EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
the union of hydrogen and oxygen to form water;
and in the combinations of vital units new proper-
ties arise which were not present in the units. This
latter process Bergson calls "creative evolution,"
but it is not fundamentally different from the sim-
ilar process in chemistry which is known as "cre-
ative synthesis." If a mysterious principle called
" vitalism" is necessary to explain the properties
of life, similar reasoning should lead one to attribute
the peculiar properties of water to "hydrism" or
of light to "photism."
It seems unfortunate that those who are con-
cerned chiefly to prove that no scientific or mecha-
nistic explanation is ever complete should thus con-
trast the phenomena of the living and the not
living worlds and attempt to build up a distinction
that is not only indefensible but is worse than use-
less, since it logically leads to the view that the
essential factors of biology, as contrasted with all
other sciences, are forever beyond the reach of sci-
entific investigation. Both animate and inanimate
nature are full of mysteries, and none of our so-
called "explanations" ever reach to the heart of
things, but it is evident that both the living and the
lifeless belong to the same universe. After all, the
principle which the advocate of natural religion is
concerned to prove is not vitalism but teleology,
and while the latter is strikingly exhibited in or-
ganisms, it is not confined to these alone, but is
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 191
found in the whole order and system of nature, as
we shall see in a later section.
Little by little all sorts of mysterious phenomena
which were once considered supernatural have been
shown to be natural, and everywhere supernat-
uralism has been losing ground and naturalism
has been gaining. But there is still a wide-spread
belief among people, who have not appreciated the
significance of this fact, that while ordinary events
occur according to nature, nevertheless natural
laws may from time to time be set aside or abro-
gated and supernatural phenomena may be inter-
posed among natural ones. In this conception,
nature is only that which is ordinary and usual,
while that which is extraordinary or unusual is
supernatural.
There are still large areas in which popular belief
in the supernatural prevails, and from time to time
revivals of this belief carry us back to the condi-
tions of earlier times. To-day a new supernatural-
ism is abroad in the world as one of the legacies of
the Great War. All sorts of supernatural manifes-
tations have been reported on the battle-fields, in
the camps, and elsewhere. One recalls the appari-
tion of the Angel of Mons and of the Virgin at
Metz, the new interest in spiritism, ouija-boards,
and the like. Those who regard such things as
supernatural manifestations and not as myths or
superstitions do so generally because they desire
192 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
to believe in the supernatural, and not infrequently
this desire is catered to by conscious deceivers.
Fakirs generally have turned largely to the exploi-
tation of the supernatural, and their methods are
now quite up to date. The old tricks of table-
tippings and spirit-rappings and writing by unseen
hands is giving place to telephonic and wireless
communications, while ghostly faces are revealed
on photographic or X-ray plates. Great emotional
crises are peculiarly favorable to such manifesta-
tions, whereas in the clear, cold light of reason
they fade away as all ghosts do.
The renewed interest in spirit manifestations
which has spread over England and America since
the war is, in many respects, similar to the belief
in witchcraft which swept over different countries
of Europe during the Middle Ages, and which lasted
in some places well into the eighteenth century.
Standing is given to such ignorant superstitions by
a few intellectual and scientific sponsors, who can
always be found for any novel or sensational belief,
whether it be a denial of the laws of causality or of
the value of scientific methods, a belief in perpetual
motion, clairvoyance, ghosts, miracles, divine heal-
ers, or reincarnations. All such beliefs represent
a protest against the slow and rational methods of
arriving at truth by careful and repeated observa-
tions and experimentations, and a belief that by
means of authority or inspiration, or occultism or
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 193
mysticism, truth may be established more rapidly
and successfully than by the slow methods of sci-
ence. But the history of all such movements in
the past abundantly confirms the conclusion that
there is no royal road to truth, and no possibility
of making real progress in human knowledge except
by the slow and laborious methods of science.
But while most persons who have had training
in distinguishing facts from fancies, realities from
vain imaginings, unite in rejecting these manifes-
tations of "spirits," no one, not even the most crass
materialist, can successfully deny the existence of
what we call " spirit," meaning by this thought,
emotions, ideals, aspirations, and volitions. These
are as much a part of human nature as are our
blood and bones and brains, but there is not a
particle of evidence that they are supernatural;
on the contrary they can be proved to be natural,
orderly, and causal. The real issue between those
who believe in supernaturalism and those who do
not is whether anywhere there are satisfactory evi-
dences that such spiritual phenomena are un-
caused, undetermined, unlawful. I know of no
such evidence.
B. SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTION OF LAW
During the past three hundred years, and espe-
cially during the past century, there has been de-
veloping a scientific conception of nature as a
194 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
system of eternal, universal laws. According to
this view nothing happens in the universe by law-
less chance or caprice; even chance and volition
have their laws, they also are a part of nature and
are " stated, fixed, and settled." This is not to
say that nature is lacking in many of the qualities
which time out of mind have been ascribed to the
supernatural, such as mystery, infinity, and super-
human power. Science indeed has revealed to us a
universe that is vastly greater, more wonderful
and more mysterious than was ever dreamed of
before, but it is an orderly, stable, settled universe
and not one of chance or caprice. Usually all that
is meant by the word " supernatural'' is super-
human or wonderful, and the modern conception
of nature has only magnified these qualities.
Of course no scientist in his senses supposes that
the whole of nature has been explored or that
more than a faint beginning has been made in
the discovery of natural laws. " There are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of
in our philosophy." Many phenomena which are
now mysterious and which are sometimes supposed
to be supernatural may yet be explained as due to
natural processes, but this would only prove that
what had been termed supernatural is really natural.
Although it is impossible to demonstrate that every-
thing is natural, because everything has not yet
been explored, it is true that everything that has
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 195
been thoroughly investigated has been found to
be natural, and this justifies the conclusion that
nature is universal.
Science attempts to classify phenomena, to re-
duce them to order, to determine the regular suc-
cession of cause and effect. It " explains" particu-
lar events by showing that they come under general
categories or "laws." For example, it is said that
the law of gravity explains not only the falling of
bodies on the earth, but also the forms and move-
ments of the earth and of the heavenly bodies.
But this means only that many different phenomena
can be brought into one category. That all mate-
rial bodies attract one another " directly as their
mass and inversely as the square of their distance"
is one of the greatest generalizations of science,
but it explains only by classifying. It offers no
explanation of why bodies attract one another in
this way. It reveals a mechanism of nature but
it does not account for that mechanism.
'Science deals only with mechanisms and proc-
esses, with the constant relation of cause and effect,
with the laws or usual operations of matter and
energy and life, with what Euripides called "the
unfailing order of immortal nature." In short it
studies the mechanisms by which things have come
to be what they are, but it cannot explain the origin
of these mechanisms nor the purpose which they
subserve. It explains the development of an egg
196 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
by revealing the steps by which the egg changes
into the adult; it explains heredity by the initial
constitution of the germplasm; it explains evolu-
tion from amoeba to 'man by the original constitu-
tion of amoeba, or of the chemical elements of
which amoeba is composed, or of the electrons con-
stituting the elements. In short it pushes back
the mystery to earlier and earlier causes but in the
last cause studied it leaves that mystery as great
and inexplicable as ever.
Philosophy and religion seek to go farther than
this and to penetrate the mystery that lies back of
the laws and mechanisms of nature. A mechanism
or machine, in ordinary usage, signifies an instru-
ment for accomplishing a result and this result is
itself the most significant aspect of a mechanism;
it is the " purpose" for which the machine exists.
Science reveals nature as a vast mechanism, philos-
ophy and religion see in this mechanism a purpose.
Science maintains that everything happens accord-
ing to natural laws; philosophy and religion in-
quire into the origin of these laws. Science ex-
plains all phenomena as natural; philosophy and
religion maintain that the greatest of all mysteries
is nature.
In the field of science the idea of the supernatural
is due to a small and insufficient view of nature.
" Nature is everything that is." In the field of
philosophy and religion the laws and order anji me-
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 197
chanisms of nature, which are the ultimate facts
of science, themselves require an explanation.
Such things are beyond the reach of science and
exact knowledge, but not beyond the reach of rea-
son and faith. In conclusion we may say with the
scientists that all is natural in that it is " stated,
fixed, settled "; and with philosophers and theo-
logians that all is supernatural in that nature can-
not explain itself. "The tormenting riddle, eternal
and inexplicable, is the existence, not of the uni-
verse, but of nature." *
C. SUPERNATURALISM IN RELIGION
In religion only has a general belief in the occa-
sional abrogation of natural laws, and the inter-
position of supernatural phenomena among those
that are natural, persisted to this day. Indeed
many persons believe that this kind of occasional
supernaturalism is the very foundation of religion,
and to them a natural religion is a contradiction
in terms. Nevertheless it is evident that the new
wine of science is fermenting powerfully in the old
bottles of theology.
* General belief in a supernatural revelation at-
tested by supernatural miracles and influencing
the lives of men by supernatural processes has
been undergoing change. The universality of law
in the natural world has led men to look for natural
* Henderson, L. J. "The Order of Nature," p. 208.
198 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
law in the spiritual world also. Supernaturalism
even in religion is a great stumbling-block to those
who find naturalism everywhere else; it makes
religion not only unnatural but unreal to many.
Accordingly we find among scientific exponents of
religion a strong current in the direction of natural-
ism rather than supernaturalism. The conflict
regarding the natural and the supernatural is no
longer exclusively between antagonists and de-
fenders of religion, it is also between scientific and
unscientific defenders.
(a) One of the first of these conflicts between
naturalism and supernaturalism in religion con-
cerned the completeness and inerrancy of the Scrip-
tures. For centuries their supernatural origin
and absolute perfection were stoutly maintained.
St. Augustine taught that the Bible contained the
sum total of all human knowledge to the end of
time. It was sometimes held to be a text-book of
all sciences as well as of faith and practice. Such a
claim was on a par with that ascribed by legend to
the Kalif Omar regarding the Koran, who is said to
have declared concerning the great Alexandrian
Museum: "If the books agree with the Koran they
are useless and need not be preserved; if they dis-
agree with it they are pernicious. Let them there-
fore be destroyed. " The Christian churches have
had ages of Bibliolatry, but in this, as in all other
similar matters, there can be but one outcome.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 199
The Bible, no less than other books, has been sub-
jected to scientific study and criticism. Such study
has shown that it is not a tfext-book of science and
that it is not supernaturally free from errors.
When Galileo was charged with teaching a dan-
gerous and damnable heresy directly opposed to
the authority of the Scriptures, it is fabled that he
replied, "The Bible was given to tell how to go to
heaven, and not how the heavens go." This answer
and all that it implies, if once accepted and believed,
would go far to quiet the age-long controversy
between science and theology. I respectfully sub-
mit that when it is attempted to make the Bible
teach astronomy, geology, biology, or any other
science, the real objects of the Scriptures are lost
sight of, the cause of religion is not advanced and
knowledge is not increased. If time permitted,
I think it could be shown that the history of past
controversies abundantly justifies this statement.
Those who insist on taking the Bible as a text-
book of science, sufficiently complete to establish
or destroy any scientific doctrine, have learned
little from the history of such claims in the past;
they can know but little of the patient, pains-
taking labors of the scientific investigator, or of the
rights of a science in its own sphere.
(&) Miracles which were once supposed to prove
the existence of the supernatural and the authen-
ticity of religion have become a source of doubt
200 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
rather than of faith in this scientific age. Many
theologians who have felt the spirit of science
explain them as allegories or as natural phenomena
not understood by those who witnessed them. And
the consensus of intelligent opinion throughout
the world is that if supernatural miracles were
performed in former times, they do not occur to-
day: "The age of miracles is past."
Many devout believers in the actuality of the
biblical miracles seek natural rather than super-
natural explanations of them, as, for example, the
passage of the Red Sea, the lightnings and thunders
of Sinai, the sun's standing still upon Gibeon,
Elijah and the chariot of fire, etc. In this connec-
tion many Princetonians will recall Dr. Macloskie's
explanation of Jonah's having found lodgment in
the laryngeal chamber of the whale, where he could
breathe, rather than in its stomach where he must
have been suffocated. Most persons have heard
natural explanations of the feeding of the multi-
tude, the stilling of the tempest, the healing of the
sick, the conversion of Paul, and many other New
Testament miracles. The eagerness with which
people grasp at parthenogenesis as a natural ex-
planation of the virgin birth, or at suspended life
and anabiosis as an explanation of the resurrection,
shows how profound is the belief in the universality
of natural law even in the case of many who believe
in the actuality of the phenomena called mirad.es.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 201
More and more the religious world is turning
away from the supernatural aspects of the miracles
to the moral lessons which they convey, from a
literal interpretation of them to their spiritual
significance. More and more all thoughtful people
are seeing that nature, rather than the super-
natural, is the greatest of all miracles. What can
be more miraculous, in the original sense of that
word, than the order of nature, the laws of matter
and energy, the course of evolution from amoeba
to man, the development of the human body and
mind and personality from an egg? Not without
reason did Mahomet, when asked to work miracles,
point to the clouds and say, " Those are God's
miracles. "
V
EVOLUTION VS. CREATION
FOR centuries science has been engaged in glori-
fying the commonplace, in showing that natural
phenomena are due to natural causes, and that the
most stupendous as well as the most subtle phenom-
ena, removed from us perhaps by almost an eternity
of time and space, are but manifestations of con-
tinuous natural processes which we may see and
study for ourselves in the common phenomena of
our daily lives. At every step in this process,
science has had to contend with intrenched super-
naturalism; to our ancestors it was self-evident
that extraordinary occurrences required extraor-
dinary causes, and that natural causes were wholly
inadequate to accomplish great results. But step
by step, before advancing knowledge of nature,
supernaturalism retired from the plane of ordinary
phenomena until she dwelt only in the misty moun-
tain tops of origins, beginnings, creations; and
day by day there was a growing respect for nature
and her powers.
Granted that wind and sun and rain, the regular
recurrence of the seasons, that human birth and
growth and death, and that even normal and ab-
normal psychoses are natural phenomena, ft is
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 203
yet contended by many that in the origin of things,
and especially in the origin of the living world, the
supernatural is supreme. "How we were secretly
wrought in the womb," "how the foundations of
the earth were laid," how animals and plants and
life itself first arose were supposed to be beyond the
reach of natural explanation and a sure proof of
supernatural creation. But the study of embry-
ology has shown that we were wrought by natural
processes, that development, although wonderful,
is not supernatural; geology has found that the
earth was formed according to natural laws; evolu-
tion teaches that the origin and transformations
of living things are the results of natural causes.
It is true that science never penetrates as far as
the ultimate origin and cause of anything. Like
those ancient myths which represented the earth
as resting upon a tortoise and the tortoise on an
elephant, which was ultimately left unsupported,
so science traces effects to causes and these to
other causes, but in the end leaves the last cause
unexplained. Science maintains that so far as
experience goes, every event is due to pre-existing
natural causes, and it assumes that this chain of
cause and effect stretches back ad infinitum, though
of course this cannot be proven. This chain may
end in a first cause, an uncaused cause. But if so
we may be sure that science will never be able to
discover it, for it lies beyond the reach of finite
204 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
knowledge and experience. The ultimate origin
of the universe is utterly inaccessible to science.
But regarding the proximate origin of the solar
system, the earth, the various forms of life upon the
earth, and last of all man, there is good scientific
evidence that here also nature is supreme, that
here also law, continuity, uniformity prevail. So
far as we know or can conclude from present evi-
dence, mechanism, law, and order are universal
and have been so from all eternity.
In this conflict of science with tradition there
have been crises, turning-points, no less important
for mankind than any which are associated with
the rise and fall of nations; such a crisis was
reached when astronomy was emancipated from
the thraldom of supernaturalism by Newton and
Laplace; when geology was freed by Hutton and
Lyell from the absurd cataclysmal theory, which
virtually taught that age after age the Creator,
experimenting at world building, found the results
not good, and so wiped them out and began again;
but probably no similar crisis has had so profound
an effect upon mankind as that revolution in our
notions of the genesis of the living world which we
associate pre-eminently with the name of Charles
Darwin.
Without doubt the greatest scientific generaliza-
tion of the last century is the theory of organic
evolution. The only other which can be compared
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 205
with it, the doctrine of the conservation of energy,
has not so profoundly influenced human life nor so
greatly changed all the currents of human thought.
Evolution has not only transformed biology, psy-
chology, sociology, and anthropology, but it has
given a new point of view to all science, art, and
even religion. "The great theory of evolution,"
said John Fiske, "is rapidly causing us to modify
our opinions on all subjects whatsoever."
Evolution is only one of many teachings of science
which have come into conflict with theology, but
because of the fact that supernaturalism made its
last and strongest stand on the creation of the
living world, and especially of man, it has been for
more than a generation the centre of this conflict.
Because organic evolution substitutes natural trans-
mutation for supernatural creation, it has been said
that it contradicts the biblical account of creation
and denies the existence or need of a Creator;
because it explains adaptations as the result of
natural selection it has been held to destroy the
evidences of design in nature; because of its con-
clusions as to the origin and nature of man it has
been accused of debasing man and reducing him to
the level of the beasts. Consequently it is not
surprising that evolution has been generally re-
garded as having more important bearings on the-
ology and religion than any other scientific doc-
trine.
VI
EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLICAL
ACCOUNT
IT has been asserted that evolution contradicts
the biblical account of creation; however it ought
not take one long to discover that although the
Bible says that God created the heavens and the
earth, the herb, the tree, the worm, the fish, the
beast, and finally man, it does not describe the
exact process by which he made them, and it is
this very question of process with which evolution
deals. I shall not attempt any subtile reconcilia-
tion of geology and Genesis or of evolution and
Revelation. I do not believe that the Bible teaches
evolution or gravitation or the undulatory theory
of light; nor on the other hand do I believe
that it contradicts these generalizations of science.
The first chapter of Genesis gives, not a literal and
scientific account of creation, but a poetic and
symbolic account. The simple but majestic lan-
guage of the creation-story tells to all people of
all grades of intelligence that back of the creature
there is a Creator. No intelligent person now main-
tains that it teaches that all things were made in
six literal days; we could not if we would main-
tain that it teaches the exact number and sequence
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 207
of geologic ages; wny should any one attempt
to maintain that it teaches the exact process of
creation?
The traditional view of special creation is not
founded upon the Mosaic account, as is commonly
supposed. There is no evidence to show that the
author of that account meant to teach that God
created a single pair of each species, as is so often
maintained, and that these species have ever since
remained perfectly distinct. On the contrary,
some of the church fathers, notably St. Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas, believed in a kind of
evolution. The current view that there was a sepa-
rate creation for each species and that there are
"as many species as issued in pairs from the hand
of the Creator" did not attain any prominence
until the time of the great naturalists, Ray and
Linnaeus, and its chief literary expression is found
not in Genesis, but in the seventh book of Milton's
"Paradise Lost." Huxley, therefore, very properly
calls it the Miltonic rather than the Mosaic hy-
pothesis. "Theology has taken upon itself the
thankless task of defending a long-abandoned
scientific theory which is without a particle of
biblical, ecclesiastical, or patristic sanction."
Any one who is accustomed to scientific methods
of inquiry must have been astonished again and
again at the crude ideas or lack of ideas which
many person? who believe in the special creation
208 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
of man exhibit with regard to the details of that
process. Those who are most bitter in their de-
nunciation of the " monkey theory," as they term
evolution, are sorely puzzled if required to give
some precise idea regarding the process by which
they conceive that God created man. The biblical
account reads, "And the Lord God formed man of
the dust of the ground and breathed into his nos-
trils the breath of life, and man became a living
soul." Here is process and, for aught we know to
the contrary, slow and gradual process. More
than that, some humble ingredients enter into
this human dough, even the dust of the earth.
Since the Scriptures plainly speak of a process in
the creation of man, the opponents of the theory
of evolution ought to be able at least to conceive
of a dignified and divine way in which the Creator
fashioned man; but, so far as I have observed, this
they do not do. The idea that the eternal God
took mud or mortar and moulded it with hands or
tools into the human form is not only irreverent,
it is ridiculous. How much more like the usual
workings of that power, by whom and through
whom are all things, is the view of evolution that
God made the first man as he has made the last,
and that his creative power is manifest just as
truly and as greatly in the origin of the last child
of Adam, as in the origin of Adam himself.
VII
IS EVOLUTION ATHEISTIC?
UNDOUBTEDLY the usual conception of God as
Creator and Ruler is that he is a supernatural
being, a Great and Good Man in the skies, who
created the universe out of nothing, set it going, and
watches over it to see that it goes right; that he
established natural laws by his word but now and
again suspends them in order to accomplish par-
ticular purposes or to benefit his worshippers. The
scientific conception of nature and of the univer-
sality of natural law conflicts with this idea, but
it does not deny the existence of that which is
symbolized by the word "God." Many scientific
generalizations have been condemned as atheistic
because they substitute natural processes for super-
natural volitions, and chief among these is the
theory of evolution.
There has long been a wide-spread misunder-
standing in the popular mind regarding evolution.
That it is a great scientific question is rarely con-
sidered; that it is the only attempt to solve by
natural processes the problem of the origin of organ-
isms is wholly disregarded. It is frequently looked
upon, not as a law of nature, but as "an invention
whereby it is hoped to get rid of a God." Even
209
210 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
Thomas Carlyle could see nothing in it but an
atheistic theory, a gospel of dirt: "I have known
three generations of Darwin's, atheists all. . , . Ah !
it is a sad and terrible thing to see nigh a whole
generation of men and women professing to be cul-
tivated, looking around in a purblind fashion and
finding no God in this universe. . . . And this
is what we have got; all things from frog-spawn;
the gospel of dirt the order of the day."
Such a view can arise only from the most funda-
mental misconception of the doctrine of evolution.
It neither affirms nor denies the existence of a God;
it deals only with processes and does not profess to
touch the question of ultimate causation. It is no
more atheistic to believe that individuals and spe-
cies originally came into existence according to the
natural law of development or evolution than it is
to believe that individuals now come into the world
according to this law. If the evolution of the spe-
cies is an atheistic doctrine, so is the development of
the individual. "Evolution," said Prof. Tyndall,
"<Joes not solve nor profess to solve the ultimate
mystery of this universe. It leaves, in fact, that
mystery untouched." Darwin, himself, held that
the theory was quite compatible with the belief in
a God; and in one of his last letters, he wrote:* "I
have never been an atheist in the sense of denying
the existence of God."
"i'Life and Letters," vol. I, p. 274.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 211
Evolution is no more diagnostic of a man's
views concerning theism than is politics. The
custom, therefore, of sharply distinguishing two
kinds of evolution, theistic and atheistic, is unfortu-
nate. One might as well speak of theistic and athe-
istic gravitation. Theists and atheists may accept
or reject either theory, but the fact of such accep-
tance or rejection in no way changes the scientific
character of the theory as such, nor does it even
remotely touch the evidences for the existence of a
God. These evidences stand quite apart from the
truth or falsity of evolution.
Science deals only with secondary causes; it
never reaches the first cause. It traces effects to
causes and these to pre-existing causes and so on
until the process must stop, hanging in mid air as
it were, without finding the first, cause. Infinity
lies back of every phenomenon, even the simplest.
Observation, experiment, and reason are the organs
of science and with these alone it cannot reach " Him
whom eye hath not seen nor ear heard." And yet
where science ends faith begins, and like the child
or the savage, the philosopher or scientist may still
say, "In the beginning God."
If the universe is finite and had a beginning,
there must have been a first cause which was itself
uncaused. But if the universe is really eternal,
nature and natural law are also eternal. Which
of jthese two conceptions is correct can never be
212 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
known by finite minds for the problem lies beyond
the reach of human knowledge. But either view
is consistent with belief in a God. In the former
case the Supreme Being, the great First~Cause that
organized and started the universe and established
natural laws is beyond and above nature; he is the
"great exception," the one Supernatural Being in all
the universe. In the latter case God is in nature,
the reason in all natural law, the purpose in all
natural processes, the supreme Mind and Will of
the universe. Whether animals and plants and the
world itself arose by special and sudden creation or
are the result of an immensely long process of evo-
lution, infinite power and wisdom are as neces-
sary in the one case as in the other; yes, I think
that there is a greater manifestation of the omnipo-
tence, omnipresence, omniscience of an Infinite
Being in the process of evolution than in that of
creation itself.
Evolution has revived the old controversy as to
the government of the universe. Even as in the
days of Newton and Laplace, it is claimed by some
persons to-day that this theory, like that of gravi-
tation, is but a subterfuge to "drive God out of
his universe and put a law in his place." As long as
the view is held that God is not present in natural
laws the conflict between science and theology must
continue. The only satisfactory ground of recon-
ciliation between the two in this matter is to be
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 213
found in the doctrine of the divine immanence in
all natural phenomena. More and more all kinds
of phenomena are being reduced to law. We are
beginning to recognize that we do not live in a
world of chance or caprice but in one of law, and
if God is present only in those phenomena which
cannot be reduced to law, he is being speedily and
certainly crowded to a narrow and narrower mar-
gin. But if he is in all law, then is he in the world
as much, yes more than ever; and every blazing
autumn hedge is really the burning bush out of
whose midst the Omnipresent speaks, every clod
is sacred ground, every day is a holy day, and we all
live in the constant presence of Deity.
"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the
plains,
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
God is law, say the wise, O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice."*
The theory of evolution has given men sublimer
conceptions of the world and of its Creator than
has any rival doctrine. Contrast the old geocentric
and anthropocentric views of the universe with
the infinitely larger view which science has revealed.
Contrast the old view of creation in six literal days
with the revelations of science as to the immensity
"Tennyson, "The Higher Pantheism."
214 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
and eternity of natural processes. Contrast the
old views that all organisms arose suddenly by
divine fiat with the view that animals and plants
and the world itself are the results of a long process
of evolution.
As Darwin so beautifully says: "There is grand-
eur in this view of life with its several powers hav-
ing been originally breathed by the Creator into a
few forms or into one, and that whilst this planet
has gone cycling on according to the first laws of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms,
most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and
are being evolved."*
There is grandeur in this view of man as the
climax of all these vast ages of past evolution, as
the highest and best product of this eternal process,
as the culmination of the lives and experiences
of innumerable multitudes of the predecessors of
man. There is grandeur in this view of the Creator
and of his relation to the world. Consider the
eternal patience, wisdom, lawfulness which has
through countless ages wrought out our present
world; consider the continual process of evolution,
the continual presence of the Creator in all natural
processes, and then contrast with this the idea of a
universe made out of nothing in six literal days
by the word of a great Workman, who stands out-
side his creation and watches it run !
* Darwin, Charles. "The Origin of Species," last paragrapji.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 215
Caird* says: "It is impossible for any one who
has breathed the spirit of modern science, modern
literature, and modern ethics, to believe in a purely
objective God; to worship any power of nature or
even any individualized outward image, such as
those of Apollo or Athene. Still less is he able to
worship a multiti4de of such images and so to com-
pensate for the defect of one imperfect form by
introducing others to supplement it. His God must
be universal, and if he tries to picture him in an
outward form, he will soon find it impossible to
rest in any one object, and will repeat in his own
experience the dialectic by which Polytheism disap-
peared in the abstract unity of Pantheism. . . . We
cannot think of the infinite Being as a will which is
external to that which it has made. We cannot
indeed think of him as external to anything, least
of all to the spiritual beings who, as such, live and
move and have their being in him."
God in the form of a Great Man in the skies is
both supernatural and unreal. How gross and
blasphemous is the crude anthropomorphism which
represents God as a "gaseous vertebrate "; how
terrible are the oaths of some hundred or more years
ago when men swore by the body, blood, bones,
teeth, and other organs of God! Contrast with
these crude material conceptions God in the form
of natural processes:
* Caird, Edward, loc. cit., p. 195.
2i6 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels,
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."*
God in all truth and beauty and love, in the order
and constitution of the universe, in the eternal
and immutable laws of nature, in the mind and
soul of man ! Here is something natural, real, and
sublime, something which appeals to the intellect
as well as to the emotions, something which in-
spires awe and reverence, something which influ-
ences conduct and shapes character.
"The God who satisfies our conscience," said
Charles Kingsley, "ought more or less satisfy our
reason also. To teach that was Butler's mission
and he fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which
has to be refulfilled again and again as human
thought changes and human science develops. For
if, in any age or country, the God who seems to
be revealed by nature seems also different from the
God who is revealed by the then popular religion,
then that God and the religion which tells of that
God will gradually cease to be believed in. For
the demands of reason, as none knew better than
good Bishop Butler, must be and ought to be
satisfied. And therefore, when a popular war
* Wordsworth, "Tintera Abbey."
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 217
arises between the reason of any generation and
its theology, then it behooves the ministers of reli-
gion to inquire, with all humility and godly fear,
on whose side lies the fault; whether the theology
which they expound is all that it should be or
whether the reason of those who impugn it is all
that it should be."
VIII
EVOLUTION AND THE DOCTRINE OF
DESIGN
EVERYWHERE the universe is a cosmos and not
a chaos; " Order is heaven's first law." Order is
seen in the whole stellar universe, the solar system,
the earth; it is strikingly evident in the phenomena
of physics and chemistry; but the order and fitness
of nature reach a climax in the living world.
Henderson has called attention to the fact that
many remarkable fitnesses or preparations for life
are found in the lifeless world. Many of the proper-
ties of water, carbon dioxide, and the chemical
compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are
unique and these unique properties are essential
to life; without them life could not exist, and they
are~so numerous that, as Henderson says, "There is
not one chance in countless millions of millions
that the many unique properties of carbon, hydro-
gen, and oxygen, and especially of their stable
compounds, water and carbonic acid, which chiefly
make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should
simultaneously occur in the three elements other-
wise than through the operation of a natural
law which somehow connects them together. There
218
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 219
is no greater probability that these unique proper-
ties should be, without due cause, uniquely favora-
ble to the organic mechanism. These are no mere
accidents; an explanation is to seek. It must
be admitted, however, that no explanation is at
hand."*
The one most striking and prominent character-
istic of living things is the apparent purpose which
is manifested in all their structures and habits.
The adaptations of organisms to environment,
of means to ends, of structures to habits has ever
been and still is the greatest problem of biology.
These adaptations of organisms are so precise and
wonderful that they seem to imply intelligent
design. Indeed it is very difficult to describe them
without saying that they exist for this or that
"purpose," and if a pure mechanist succeeds in
avoiding the use of this particular word by substi-
tuting for it some other term, such as "significance"
or "use," he cannot wholly avoid the idea of pur-
pose.
It is scarcely possible to speak of any structure
or function of an animal or plant that does not
illustrate such adaptations. Think of the fitness
of various types of limbs for locomotion on land,
in water, and in air; of the various kinds of ali-
mentary organs for the digestion and absorption
of different sorts of food; of the many contrivances
* Henderson, L. J. "The Fitness of the Environment," p. 276.
220 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
for offense and defense, which different organisms
possess. Consider the remarkable structures and
habits for insuring cross-fertilization in animals and
plants and for the protection and nourishment of
the young. Think of the fitness of the skeleton for
support, of the muscles for contraction, of the heart
with its valves for pumping blood, of the nervous
system for receiving and transmitting stimuli;
think of the fitness of the eye for seeing, of the
ear for hearing, of the nose for smelling; think of
the fitness of every organ for its particular use, and
then consider the peculiar fitness with which all
these organs and all their innumerable parts are
co-ordinated into one harmonious whole. Viewed
in this light "what a piece of work is a man," or
any other organism !
Or consider the wonderful adaptations to be
seen in the reactions and tropisms of the simplest
organisms; in the instincts and habits of higher
animals; in the development of intelligence and
reason in man. Even one-celled animals and plants
seem to be guided by intelligence though we know
that this is not really true; however in general
they avoid injurious environments and find bene-
ficial ones, and they have solved their problems
of nutrition, reproduction, and defense almost as
perfectly as have the highest animals. The in-
stincts of the different members of a colony of ants
or bees are very complex and very different, and yet
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 221
all are wonderfully well adapted to the preserva-
tion and prosperity of the colony. The migratory
habits of fishes and birds are even more remarkable;
the value of these habits is easily seen, but what
series of natural causes can explain their origin?
Finally, consider that the marvellous instincts, in-
telligence, and psychic capacity of man have de-
veloped out of the apparently simple reactions of
a germ cell and that this whole process of develop-
ment has been so co-ordinated and every step has
been so well adapted and directed that it leads to
consciousness and reason and purpose !
How can all these marvellous fitnesses of the
living world and its environment be explained?
The unhesitating answer of the naive person is that
each and every one of them must have been de-
signed in detail by an intelligent and supernatural
Designer. And yet when studied in detail it is
evident that each adaptation is a natural rather
than a supernatural phenomenon, though it is
by no means certain that in the last analysis it is
the result of chance or pure mechanism. Some
of the world's great philosophers and scientists,
from Aristotle and Plato to Kant, Schopenhauer,
Lamarck, Cope, Bergson, Driesch, and Henderson,
have maintained that the fitness and order of na-
ture can be explained only by assuming that there
is some sort of ideological principle in nature, which
lies back of or runs parallel with the principle of
222 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
causality something which acts more or less like
human will or purpose, and which is itself an un-
caused cause lying outside the field of scientific
inquiry.
Kant has expressed this opinion in a well-known
passage: "It is quite certain that we cannot be-
come sufficiently acquainted with organized crea-
tures and their hidden potentialities by aid of
purely mechanical natural principles, much less
can we explain them: and this is so certain that
we may boldly assert that it is absurd for man
even to conceive such an idea, or to hope that a
Newton may one day arise to make even the pro-
duction of a blade of grass comprehensible, accord-
ing to natural laws ordained by no intention."
Haeckel and other pure mechanists have hailed
Darwin as Kant's impossible Newton of the living
world and his theory of "natural selection" as the
purely mechanical principle which accounts for the
adaptations of organisms. Darwin proved in mas-
terly manner that overpopulation leads to a struggle
for existence, and in this struggle the unfit are
eliminated and the fit are favored. In this way
many of the remarkable adaptations of the living
world can be causally explained, and if this princi-
ple of the elimination of the unfit is extended from
whole organisms to parts of organisms, germinal
units, and even to the reactions of individual or-
ganisms, it is possible that all kinds of adapta-
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 223
tions may be thus explained. The origin of fitness
rather than the " origin of species" is the greatest
problem in the world of life and it is the crowning
glory of Darwin's theory that it offers a mechanistic
solution of this eternal problem of life and evolu-
tion.
If this be true, does it not finally dispose of tele-
ology in nature? I think not, although it undoubt-
edly modifies that doctrine and substitutes natural
causes for supernatural ones. In the light of Dar-
win's theory we see that adaptations are the results
of natural causes; the causal mechanism applies to
all the fitnesses of nature as well as to other phe-
nomena; but back of all mechanism, or running
through all mechanism, is teleology or purpose.
From the standpoint of science and philosophy
the origin of this order and mechanism is the great
secret of the universe. Science deals only with
mechanisms and a purely scientific explanation
must be mechanistic, but there is no mechanical
explanation for the ultimate mechanism of the
universe; mechanism cannot explain itself. The
mechanism of a locomotive will explain what
it does, but it will not explain its origin nor the
purpose which it subserves. The organization of
an animal or plant or egg is said to explain what
it does but it will not explain the teleological na-
ture of that organization.
Biologists no longer think of any adaptation as
224 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
having been directly created for the purpose which
it now serves but rather as having been slowly
developed in the course of evolution. Neverthe-
less in tracing an adaptation to its sources we do
no more than transfer the origin of fitness to earlier
causes. We may explain the fitness of the eye as
due to its ontogenetic development, and this as
due to heredity and environment, but this does
not explain how the potentialities of the eye came
to be in the germplasm. We have merely shifted
the problem to an earlier stage. And the same is
true of the evolution of eyes; our explanation of
the origin of eyes may be that they are due to
mutation and natural selection, or to the inherited
effects of use and disuse, but in either case we do
not explain the fact that eyes were potentially
present in these causes. We have merely shifted
the problem from the fitness of results to the fitness
of the causes of those results; and in spite of Darwin
and his great theory it is still true that no Newton
has yet arisen "to make even the production of a
blade of grass comprehensible, according to natural
laws ordained by no intention."
Most of all when we consider the whole course of
evolution from amoeba to man, from the simplest
motor responses to the development of intelligence
and reason capable of studying the universe and its
origin, are we impressed with the thought that
evolution must have been guided by something
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 225
other than chance. If progressive evolution is
increasing complexity of organization and increas-
ing adaptation to the environment, it is surely no
accident that organization and environment have
been so correlated that they have led to the per-
fection of adaptation which we see all about us.
Evolution has not been an eternal see-saw; it has
led somewhere. The fact that organisms can adapt
themselves to changing environment is no accident;
the fact that environment has so changed as to
bring about progress is no accident. Philosophi-
cally it is impossible to escape the conclusion that
evolution has revealed a larger teleology than was
ever dreamed of before a teleology which takes in
not only the living but also the lifeless world.
Given water, carbon dioxide, and the carbon
compounds with the unique properties to which
Henderson has called attention, and it is conceiva-
ble that life could have arisen through the operation
of natural laws; and again when once life and its
mechanisms are given the living world could have
evolved through the operation of natural laws.
In the transformations of germplasm and of inher-
itance units we probably have the mechanism of
evolution, and in the survival of the fit and the
elimination of the unfit we probably have the mech-
anism of adaptation. But the great problem and
mystery which lies back of all this mechanism is
how jthe environment favorable to life came to
226 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
have these unique properties, how it happened that
all the multitudes of co-operating factors necessary
to the origin of life came together in the right way
and at the right time, how 'primitive protoplasm
came to contain the potencies of all future evolu-
tion, and how it happens that the environment
was such as to bring out these potencies in the
long course of evolution.
These are not scientific problems, for they are
probably beyond the reach of science and exact
knowledge, but not beyond the reach of philosophy
and religion. The philosophical mind refuses to
believe that purpose in human behavior and fitness
in nature are merely the result of chance, even of
many chances. As well might one try to explain
the play of Hamlet as due to an explosion, or a
series of explosions in a printing office. Many of
the most profound students of nature from Aris-
totle to modern evolutionists have found it neces-
sary to assume the existence of some initial teleo-
logical principle. Weismann held tenaciously to
a mechanistic conception of nature, but he also
held that extreme mechanism was consistent with
extreme teleology; indeed he maintained that
"The most complete mechanism conceivable is
likewise the most complete teleology conceivable.
With this conception vanish all apprehensions that
the new views of evolution would cause man to lose
the best that he possesses morality and purely
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 227
human culture." And no less a mechanist than
Huxley said, " Perhaps the most remarkable ser-
vice to the philosophy of biology rendered by Mr,
Darwin is the reconciliation of teleology and mor-
phology, and the explanation of the facts of both
which his views offer. The teleology which sup-
poses that the eye, such as we see it in man or one
of the higher vertebrata, was made with the pre-
cise structure which it exhibits, for the purpose of
enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has
undoubtedly received its death-blow. Neverthe-
less it is necessary to remember that there is a
wider teleology, which is not touched by the doc-
trine of evolution, but is actually based upon the
fundamental proposition of evolution. " And Dar-
win himself confesses "the extreme difficulty or
rather impossibility of conceiving this immense
and wonderful universe, including man with his
capacity of looking far backward and far into
futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.
When thus reflecting/' he continues, "I feel com-
pelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent
mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and
I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion
was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I
can remember, when I wrote the ' Origin of Species';
and it is since that time that it has very gradually,
with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then
arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has,
228 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as
low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be
trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? 5 ' *
The probabilities are almost infinity to one
against the conclusion that the order of nature, the
fitness of the environment for life, and the course
of progressive evolution with all of its marvellous
adaptations are all the results of blind chance.
The scientist and philosopher may explain this
order and harmony by a mysterious and inexplica-
ble teleological principle, but the convinced theist
will regard it as design. Thus upon this topic,
Asa Gray, the well-known botanist, said: "The
wiser and stronger ground to take is that the deriv-
ative hypothesis leaves the argument for design,
and therefore for a Designer, as valid as it ever
was; that to do any work by instruments must
require, and therefore presuppose, the exertion
rather of more than of less power than to do it
directly; that whoever would be a consistent theist
should believe that Design in the natural world is
co-extensive with Providence, and hold as firmly
to the one as he does to the other."
On the other hand the more cautious scientific
attitude is well expressed by Henderson in the fol-
lowing thoughtful sentences: "We may progres-
sively lay bare the order of nature and define it
with the aid of the exact sciences. Thus we may
* "Lift and Letters," vol. I, p. 282.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 229
recognize it for what it is, and now at length we
clearly see that it is teleological. But we shall
never find the explanation of the riddle, for it
concerns the origin of things. Upon this subject
dear ideas and close reasoning are no longer possi-
ble, for thought has arrived at one of its natural
frontiers. Nothing more remains but to admit
that the riddle surpasses us and to conclude that
the contrast of mechanism with teleology is the
very foundation of the order of nature, which must
ever be regarded from two complementary points
of view, as a vast assemblage of changing systems,
and as an harmonious unity of changeless laws and
qualities working together in the process of evolu-
tion/ 5 * In short, science reveals to us a universe
of ends as well as of means, of teleology as well as
of mechanism, and in this it agrees with the teach-
ings of philosophy and religion.
* "The Order of Nature," pp. 20^-200.
IX
THE NATURE OF MAN
THE theory of evolution presumes to determine
man's place in nature and to many it seems that it
degrades man and reduces him to the level of the
beasts. That man is an animal, however, no one
who has given the matter any consideration, can
for a moment doubt. The entire structure, develop-
ment, and functions of man's body unmistakably
proclaim that he is related to the animals. He is
born, nourished, and reproduced, he is subject to
the laws of nature, to disease and death as is the
humblest animal or plant. Every bone, muscle,
and nerve of the human body is found in almost
exactly the same position and shape in the higher
mammals. As Romanes says, t " Here we have a
fact, or rather a hundred thousand facts, which
cannot be attributed to chance, and if we reject
the natural explanation of hereditary descent from
a common ancestry we can only suppose that the
Deity in creating man took the most scrupulous
pains to make him in the image of the beasts."
According to his physical structure man must be
classified as an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal,
and finally a primate, to which order the monkeys
230
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 231
belong. And yet there are emotionalists who deny
this animal classification. John Fiske tells of a
man who became very indignant when told that he
was a mammal and exclaimed: "I am not a mam-
mal, nor the son of a mammal." He adds that he
had probably been brought up on a bottle.
Many persons can see in such animal ancestry
only the loss of dignity and the degradation of
man, and I freely admit that as sometimes expound-
ed by evolutionists this opinion is justified. If
man is the result of unintelligent forces and proc-
esses; if as one biologist has said, "The evolu-
tion of consciousness is the greatest blunder in the
universe"; if men are born by millions only to be
swept away by flood, fire, famine, pestilence, and
war; if they live and die like the beasts and leave
only their bones and implements behind; if suffer-
ing and struggle are purposeless and lead to noth-
ing if this really were the teaching of evolution
then certainly it would be true that evolution de-
bases man and destroys the hopes of mankind.
But this is not true and it is not the teaching of
evolution but rather of pessimism and atheism.
The blighting influence of atheism is shown in
just such conclusions as those mentioned, for it
substitutes blind chance and necessity for plan and
purpose, both in nature and in human life. If
there is no teleology in nature, the course of evo-
lutipn leading to man and to consciousness is the
232 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
result of blind and blundering accident. If there
is no purpose or value in human labor and suffer-
ing, life is not worth living. But there are evi-
dences of teleology in nature and of purpose in
human life. Even struggle and suffering and death
have their value if in the long course of evolution
they lead to progress. Men do not die and leave
only their bones and implements, but "they rest
from their labors and their works do follow them."
"Others have labored and we have entered into
their labors." Civilization is what it is to-day be-
cause of the labor and influence of millions of per-
sons, most of whom are wholly unknown to us.
Only a few men have achieved immortal fame, but
multitudes have contributed to human progress.
Granting that there is teleology in nature, prog-
ress in evolution, and purpose in human life, it does
not really matter from the standpoint of religion
whether the universe and man came into existence
by evolution or by creation. I cannot see that it
is any more degrading to hold that man was made
through a long line of animal ancestry, which ulti-
mately came from the dust, than to believe that
man was made directly from the dust. Surely the
horse and the dog and the monkey belong to higher
orders of existence than do the clod and the stone.
Whether we accept the teaching of evolution or the
most literal interpretation of the biblical account
we arc compelled to recognize the fact that c our
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 233
bodily origin has been a humble one; as Sir Charles
Lyell once said, "It is mud or monkey." Nature,
revelation, and human history love to proclaim the
fact that lowliness of origin is not inconsistent with
the highest ideals of perfection. "They that deny
a God destroy man's nobility," said Bacon; "for
surely man is of kin to the beasts by his body;
and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is
an ignoble creature."
To those whose only thought of the animal
creation is one of contempt and disgust, the sug-
gestion of man's animal ancestry must come as a
cruel shock. But those whose eyes are opened to
the beauty and innocence, the joys and sufferings,
the strength and weakness, the intelligence and
affection of living things; those who believe with
Coleridge that
"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
those whose lives are simple and who are not
puffed up with a foolish pride as to their own dignity
will neither be ashamed nor afraid to follow the
example of St. Francis of Assisi who called the
birds his brothers and thought that they praised
God in the forest as the angels do in heaven.
But if man is the brother of the animals, he is
234 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
also akin to the Infinite. The glory of the brute
is physical, the glory of man is intellectual, social,
spiritual. The perfection reached by the brute is
strength, cunning, at best moral innocence; the
perfection reached by man is intelligence, reason,
freedom, faith, hope, love in short, noble char-
acter. The psychical elements which in animals are
"cabined, cribbed, confined" reach in man their
fullest expansion. The intellect, the emotions, the
will, love, mercy, justice, responsibility, philan-
thropy, conscience, the search after and worship
of the true, the beautiful, the good, the Infinite
these proclaim man a spiritual being. Evolution
teaches the animal ancestry of man, but in spite of
this it does not degrade him, for it teaches that
he is the consummation of this stupendous process.
"The dignity of man is not due to the fact that re-
cently and miraculously he was launched into the
world; the real dignity of man consists not in his
origin, but in what he is and what he may become. "
Evolution unquestionably denies that the primi-
tive condition of mankind was one of perfection
as measured by our present standards. In this
regard it is in entire accord with the conclusions of
history and archaeology. There is every evidence
that human history has been a development from a
simpler to a more complex state; in short an evolu-
tion. As to the culture of the prehistoric period
there can be no question that it was in every way
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 235
simpler and more primitive than that of the his-
toric era, as is demonstrated by prehistoric remains
and indirectly proven by a study of races at present
in the prehistoric condition.
This primitive condition of the race could scarce-
ly be called a state of perfection. According to
the biblical account Adam and Eve were naked,
houseless, uncultured; in body fully developed,
in mind and soul children. That they were inno-
cent as children are, has been interpreted by many
to mean that they were perfect, not only physically
and morally but also intellectually. Lyman Abbott
says that he once heard a preacher say in one of
his sermons that Adam and Eve undoubtedly
knew all about the telephone. There are probably
few even among literalists who would go that far
to-day.
As a result of this animal ancestry many animal
instincts survive in man which conflict with his
higher intellectual and social life. In this way
there comes to be that lack of inner harmony and
social fitness to which all religions and all systems
of ethics have directed attention. This is the main
source of the conflict between emotionalism and
rationalism, between the individual and society.
So far as I can judge, animals, even the highest,
are not troubled by a sense of sin, repentance, or
responsibility. On the other hand, mankind as a
whole is characterized by the possession of such
336 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
a sense. Between animals and men there is this
great difference. If man came from the animals
he also must have come from an irresponsible and
hence an innocent condition. Before any "fall"
from this condition was possible there must have
been the step upward to responsibility and moral
consciousness. So far as we know the highest
animals have only the most rudimentary moral
ideals. Only in him in whose soul are lofty ideals
can there be any adequate consciousness of a fall.
A man whose ideals were wholly brutish would
have no condemnation in living the life of a brute.
But he who has awakened to the fact that he is a
social and moral being, who knows the better and
does the worse, he has fallen from the higher to
the lower. Until reason and the moral sense are
developed in man there can be no fall; there is
nothing to fall from. When these are developed
there arises a conflict between the old habits of
unreason, irresponsibility, and sensuous pleasure
and the new ideals of reason, responsibility, and
duty; when in this conflict the former overcome
the latter there is a moral fall. In this sense the
"fall of man" is no unique historical event; it is
a part of the personal experience of all men.
THE RELIGION OF EVOLUTION
FRANCIS GALTON closes his book on "Inquiries
into Human Faculties" with these words: "The
chief result of these inquiries has been to elicit
the religious significance of the doctrine of evolu-
tion. It suggests an alteration in our mental atti-
tude and imposes a new moral duty. The new
mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral
freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new
duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently
with, and not in opposition to, the old ones upon
which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor
to further evolution, especially that of the human
race."
A. PROGRESS THROUGH STRUGGLE
The religion of evolution is a religion of progress
through struggle and effort. It is neither pessi-
mism nor optimism, but realism. It recognizes
the existence of unfitness, disharmony, and evil, but
interprets these as challenges to their alleviation.
The powers of nature which were feared and dreaded
by our savage ancestors have been harnessed for
the service of man. Great catastrophes in which
hundreds of lives are lost in fires and floods and
238 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
wrecks teach a lesson which even ignorance can
appreciate, namely that some way must be found
to avoid these things in the future. Disease, suffer-
ing, and death are challenges to man of the most
insistent and persistent sort to find out their causes
and to eliminate or control them. Millions of
human beings suffered and died from tuberculosis,
plague, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, malaria,
syphilis, cancer, and other diseases before remedies
for some of these were found, and millions more will
suffer and die before they are eliminated but does
any far-seeing person doubt that this will ultimately
be achieved? Injustice and crime, ignorance and
superstition are not useless if they lead society
to seek out their causes and to eliminate them.
Even the horrors of war teach a lesson which the
world is slowly learning and, if mankind can learn
by experience, the time will come when war shall
be no more. And as to the inner conflict between
emotion and reason, selfishness and altruism, evil
and good, we know from experience that progress
can be made only by effort; that inner peace does,
not come from satiety but from successful struggle;
"That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."
The religion of evolution holds forth no hope of
a perfect millennium in which all evil shall be elimi-
nated and all struggle shall cease. On the cpn-
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 239
trary it teaches that not only progress but even
continued existence depends upon struggle against
adverse conditions. There can be no progress of
any kind without struggle; in physical evolution
progress has depended upon the struggle for exist-
ence; in intellectual evolution upon the struggle
for freedom and enlightenment; in social evolution
upon the struggle of ethical ideals and instincts
against antisocial ones. Passively waiting for evo-
lution to carry us to the skies will be of no avail.
Progress is no necessary part of evolution and in
general it is easier to go backward than forward.
The further evolution of man must depend upon
the struggle and success of rational efforts and
ideals. We must seek through eugenics and eu-
thenics to improve the bodies of men; through
education, the minds of men; through religion the
morals of men. We must struggle against disease
and physical defects, against effeminacy, luxury,
and indolence, and against the retrogressive selec-
tion of civilization; we must struggle against igno-
rance, illiteracy, and superstition; against bigotry,
selfishness, brutality, and hate. The struggle against
evil in general is thus a condition of social progress,
as the struggle for existence against adverse con-
ditions is a factor in physical progress.
Evolution thus offers a rational solution of the
great problem of evil. It has taught us that there
is, all about us a great and world- wide struggle for
240 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
existence; that inaction and satiety end in degen-
eration and that advance can be purchased only
by struggle, suffering, and death. The apparent
malevolence of nature finds in evolution a benef-
icent explanation. Measured by its results who
will say that the outcome of evolution is not worth
all that it has cost ? Purposeless struggle and suffer-
ing would be evidence of malevolence; but evolu-
tion has shown that struggle, suffering, and death
when viewed from the standpoint of nature as a
whole are not purposeless, but rather that these
things are factors in a great world movement, in an
infinite process of evolution in which the " whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain . . . wait-
ing for the manifestation of the sons of God." The
religion of evolution is thus at one with the re-
ligion of revelation.
B. ETHNOCENTRIC RATHER THAN EGOCENTRIC
A religion that looks merely to personal rewards
or punishments in the present or future is not one
of the highest type; on the other hand the religion
of service and sacrifice for the good of others, the
religion of which Christ was the great exemplar,
must more and more become the religion of human
society in future stages of evolution.
In the past religion has dealt to a large extent
with the individual and his relation to God; its
chief concern was the salvatibn of individual souls
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 241
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. Evolution has taught us
the superlative importance of the race or species.
Among all organisms the one lives for the many,
the individual reproduces and labors and dies for
the race. In man no less than in lower organisms
the welfare and evolution of the species is of supreme
concern. And the greatest and most practical
work of religion is to further the evolution of a
better race. This religion looks forward not only
to better individuals as its ultimate goal, but also
to a better association of individuals; to a rational
organization of society in which social specializa-
tion and co-operation will be greatly increased, in
which poverty and disease will be greatly decreased,
in which heredity, environment, and education will
be greatly improved.
At times it seems that selfishness and intolerance
are on the increase, that all social progress has
stopped and that degeneration and disintegration
have set in. At present we are witnessing an out-
break of license and anarchy on one side and of
reaction and intolerance on the other. At such
times it is especially necessary to take the long view
of human evolution, to remember from what so-
ciety has developed, and to realize that in the course
of Asocial evolution selfishness, bigotry, and anarchy
242 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
are eliminated as foul water is purified in flowing
down stream. The antisocial, the selfish, and the
unscrupulous find that as their hand is against
every man so is every man's hand against them.
This is the law of reciprocity. All normal men are
"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of
scorn, the love of love." Service is not only the
law of society, it alone is the way of success. The
ethnocentric religion of evolution merely supple-
ments and enforces the ethical teachings of the
most advanced religions; in all of them the goal is
the same, namely service.
If it be true that the fittest physically is the most
viable, the fittest intellectually the most rational,
the fittest socially the most ethical, then it follows
that in the long run natural selection will operate
against the less viable, the less rational, and the
less ethical. There is "a power not ourselves that
makes for righteousness/' for reasonableness, and
for fitness. As the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera, so the nature of things makes for
progress.
Can this religion of science and evolution be
incorporated in the organized religions of the civi-
lized world? Can religion in general keep pace
with the intellectual and social advance of man-
kind? Can it rid itself of its useless inheritances
from a savage past; can it thr6w off the relics of
fetichism, emotionalism, and superstition; can it
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 243
be saved from irrationalism, literalism, and formal-
ism ? Can Christianity become the religion of rea-
son and science as well as of emotion and faith
and be made the power for individual and social
progress which its founder intended?
Certainly progress in this direction has been
slow, and at times it seems as if religious evolution
had come to an end. Thousands of thoughtful
and reverent men have left the churches and re-
nounced the creeds, the literal interpretation of
which they could no longer support, and other
thousands have been prevented from doing this
only by the hope that churches and creeds might
be reformed from within. We must recognize the
fact that complete uniformity of belief can never
be attained in religion any more than in politics
or anything else. Various churches and faiths
must always exist for various types of human be-
ings. It is often said that existing forms of religion
with their literalism and formalism are well adapted
to the mass of mankind. This is probably true;
most men are not greatly interested in an intellec-
tual or philosophical type of religion, but all men
are interested in higher ideals of conduct and duty.
In all progress religion should lead rather than lag
behind, and at least its intellectual requirements
need not be so primitive as to drive out those of
more advanced intelligence.
How extraordinary it is that nineteen centuries
244 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
after the life and labors of the greatest religious
teacher and social reformer in the history of man-
kind, and after the spread of his teachings over all
the earth, there should still be left a considerable
body of his so-called followers who identify re-
ligion with the literalism and formalism which he
condemned and whose test of righteousness is
intellectual assent to a formal creed rather than
dedication to a life of service ! But to-day we are
in the midst of a religious revolution, which is
going on so quietly that many do not notice it,
although it is a greater and more fundamental
revolution than any since the early years of the
Christian era. We are witnessing great changes
in the attitude of the churches on questions of
faith and science. The spirit of science has entered
into religion. This spirit demands not uniformity
of belief but uniformity of aim, not absolute and
perfect truth but the best available truth, not
authority but evidence, not words but works; and
more and more religion is demanding these things.
The time may come sooner than some of us expect
when in all things except spirit and purpose re-
ligion may once more be a personal matter; when
churches will welcome all "men of good-will";
when love of God and love of fellow men will be
the one requirement for mutual fellowship and ser-
vice. When that time comes religion and science
will be at one.
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 245
C. THE OUTCOME OF EVOLUTION
Speculations as to the meaning and outcome of
evolution have no place in science but they % do
occupy a prominent and legitimate place in every
mind. We are creatures of a day ; we catch glimpses
of great world processes which come out of eternity
and go into eternity and it would be presumptuous
to suppose that we could wholly comprehend these
processes or forecast their outcome. And yet as
we may reason from the present to the past, so we
may justly, though perhaps imperfectly, reason
from present and past to the future.
The past course of evolution together with the
evidences for teleology in nature are strong argu-
ments for a plan or purpose in evolution, the ulti-
mate unfolding of which is probably beyond our
power to conceive. This purpose is, at least in
part, already indicated. Man is the highest product
of evolution. There is good reason to believe that
no higher animal will ever appear upon the earth.
Although the limits of individual evolution may
have been reached, at least for the present, there
is good evidence that we have barely begun to
realize the possibilities of social evolution. To a
large extent mankind holds the power of controlling
its destiny on this planet. Evolution through all
the ages has been leading to a higher intellectual,
ethical, and spiritual life. There is no reason to
246 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
believe that it will change its course to-morrow.
But as in former ages progress passed from indi-
vidual cells to many-celled organisms, so now it
is passing from individual organisms to society.
While we cannot see the goal we can see our present
duty.
The religion of evolution deals with this world
rather than with the next. It prays "Thy king-
dom come, thy will be done on earth" It seeks to
build here and now "The City of God." It looks
forward to a time when "Righteousness shall
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea." It
looks forward to unnumbered ages of human prog-
ress upon the earth, to ages of better social organi-
zation, of increasing specialization and co-operation
among individuals and races and nations, to ages of
greater justice and peace and altruism. Indeed
the religion of evolution is nothing new, but is the
old religion of the world's greatest leaders and
teachers, the religion of Confucius and Plato and
Moses and especially of Christ which strives to
develop a better and nobler human race and to
establish the kingdom of God on the earth.
To us it is given to co-operate in this greatest
work of all time and to have a part in the triumphs
of future ages, not merely by improving the condi-
tions of individual life and development and educa-
tion, but much more by improving the ideals of
society and by breeding a better race of men
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 247
who wiD " Mould things nearer to the heart's
desire. "
The inspiring visions of prophets and seers con-
cerning a new heaven, a new earth, and a new hu-
manity find confirmation and not destruction in
human evolution viewed in retrospect and in pros-
pect, for the past and present tendencies of evolu-
tion justify the highest hopes for the future and
inspire faith in the final culmination *f this great
law in
" one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
