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Science As A Rule Of Life( Originally Published 1919 )
Saint or sinner, some rule of life we must have, even if we are wholly unconscious of the fact. A
spiritual director will help us to map out a course of action which will assist us to shake off some little of the dust of this dusty world ; and a doctor will lay down for us a dietary which will help us to elude, for a time at least, the insidious onsets of the gout. Even if we take no formal steps, spiritual or corporeal, some rule of life we must
As to the Christian ideals little need be said, since we know very well what they are, and know
this most especially, that practically all of them are in direct opposition to what we may call the ideals of Nature, and exercise all their influence in frustrating such laws as that of Natural Selection.
" Nature's Insurgent Son," as Sir Ray Lankester calls him, is at constant war with Nature, and
when we come to consider the matter carefully, in that respect most fully differentiates himself
from all other living things, none of which make any attempt to control the forces of Nature
for their own advantage. " Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who do not rise to
her standard—survival and parentage for those alone who do—has been from the earliest times
more and more definitely resisted by the will of man. If we may for the purpose of analysis, as
it were, extract man from the rest of Nature, of which he is truly a product and a part, then we
may say that man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says ' Die ! ' man says ' I will live.' "
To this it may be added that, under the influence of Christianity, man goes a step further
and says : " I will endeavour that as many others as may be shall live, and live happy, healthy lives, and shall not untimely die." The law of Natural Selection could not be met by more direct
opposition. I have said that this is under the influence of Christianity, yet the impulse seems
to be older than that, to be part of that moral law which excited Kant's admiration, which he
coupled with the sight of the starry heavens, an impulse, we can scarcely doubt, implanted in the
heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many—some would say most—of the
less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race by an enervating superstition.
Dr. Marett has carefully examined into this matter, and his conclusions are of the greatest
interest.'
"My own theory about the peasant, as I know him, and about people of lowly culture in general
so far as I have learnt to know about them, is that the ethics of amity belong to their natural
and normal mood, whereas the ethics of enmity, being but as the shadow of a passing fear,' are
relatively accidental. Thus to the thesis that human charity is a by-product, I retort squarely
with the counter-thesis that human hatred is a by-product. The brute that lurks in our common
human nature will break bounds sometimes ; but I believe that whenever man, be he savage or
civilised, is at home to himself, his pleasure and pride is to play the good neighbour. It may be
urged by way of objection that I overestimate the amenities, whether economic or ethical, of the
primitive state ; that a hard life is bound to produce a hard man. I am afraid that the
psychological necessity of the alleged correlation is by no means evident to me. Surely the hard-working individual can find plenty of scope for his energies without needing, let us say, to beat his wife. Nor are the hard-working peoples of the earth especially notorious for their inhumanity. Thus the Eskimo, whose life is one long fight against the cold, has the warmest of hearts. Mr. Stefanson says of his newly discovered ' Blonde Eskimo,' a people still living in the stone age : ' They are the equals of the best of our own race in good breeding, kindness, and the substantial virtues.' Or again, heat instead of cold may drive man to the utmost limit of his natural affections. In the deserts of Central Australia, where the native is ever threatened by a scarcity of food, his constant preoccupation is not how to prey on his companions. Rather he unites with them in guilds and brotherhoods, so that they may feast together in the spirit, sustaining themselves with the common hope and mutual suggestion of better luck to come. But there is no need to go so far afield for one's proofs. I appeal to those who have made it their business to be intimate with the folk of our own countryside. Is it not the fact that unselfishness in regard to the sharing of the necessaries of life is characteristic
of those who find them most difficult to come by ?
The poor are by no means the least ' rich towards God.' At any rate, if poverty sometimes
hardens, wealth, especially sudden wealth, can harden too, causing arrogance, boastfulness, and
the bullying temper. ' A proud look, a lying tongue, and the shedding of innocent blood '-these go together."
On the whole, then, we may perhaps conclude that the natural bias of mankind is towards kindness to his neighbour, however much the brute in him may sometimes impel him to uncharitable
words or actions. And certainly this natural bias is intensified and made into a binding law by
the teachings of Christ. But there is the other point of view set forward in the philosophy of
Nietzsche—if indeed such writings are worthy of the name philosophy. " The world is for the
superman. Dominancy within the human kind must be secured at all costs. As for the old values,
they are all wrong. Christian humility is a slavish virtue ; so is Christian charity. Such
values have become denaturalised.' They are the by-product of certain primitive activities,
which were intended by Nature to subserve strictly biological ends, but have somehow escaped
from Nature's control and run riot on their own account."
The prophets of this group of ideals, or some such group of ideals, have no hesitation in telling
us how they would direct the affairs of humanity if they were entrusted with their conduct. It
will not be without interest to consider their plans and to endeavour to form some sort of an
idea of what kind of place the world would be if they had their way. We can then form our own opinion as to whether a world conducted on such lines would be in any way a tolerable place
for human existence.
First of all we may dwell briefly on Natural Selection as a rule of life, since it has been put forward as such by quite a number of persons.
Never, let it at once be said, by the great and gentle-hearted originator of that theory, who
during his life had to protest as to the ignorant and exaggerated ideas which were expressed about it and who, were he now alive, would certainly be shocked at the teachings which are supposed to follow from his theory and the dire results which
they have produced.'
In the first place such a doctrine leads directly to the conclusion that war, instead of being the curse and disaster which all reasonable people, not to say all Christians, feel it to be, is, as Bernhardi puts it, " a biological necessity, a regulative element in the life of mankind that cannot be dispensed with." It is " the basis of all healthy development." " Struggle is not merely the destructive but the life-giving principle. The law of the strong holds good everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to secure for themselves the most favourable conditions. The weaker succumb." Humanity has had at times evidences of the results of this teaching which are not, one may fairly say, of a kind to commend themselves to any person possessed of a moderately kindly, not to say of a Christian, disposition.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have the opportunity of studying the experiment in actual
operation in a race which, of course in entire ignorance of the fact, is actually putting into
practice the teachings of Natural Selection, though it must be admitted that the practice has
not been successful, nor does it look like being successful, in raising that race above the very
lowest rung of the ladder of civilisation. Captain Whiffen has given a very complete and a very interesting account of the peoples whom he met with during his wanderings in the regions indicated by the title of his book. And he tells us that " the survival of the most fit is the very real and the very stern rule of life in the Amazonian forests. From birth to death it rules the Indians life and philosophy. To help to preserve the unfit would often be to prejudice the chances of the fit. There are no arm-chair sentimentalists to oppose this very practical consideration. The Indian judges it by his standard of common sense : why live a life that has ceased to be worth living when there is no bugbear of a hell to make one cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery ? " Let us now see the kind of life which the author, freed himself no doubt from " the bugbear of hell," considers eminently sensible—the kind of life of which only an " arm-chair sentimentalist " would disapprove , a kind of life, it may be added, which will appear to most ordinarily minded people as being one of selfishness raised to its highest power.
To begin with the earliest event in life. If a child, on its appearance in the world, appears to
be in any way defective, its mother quietly kills it and deposits its body in the forest. If the
mother dies in childbirth the child, unless someone takes pity on it and adopts it, is killed by the father, who, it may be presumed, is indisposed to take the trouble, perhaps indeed incapable of doing so, of rearing the motherless babe. That the child, in any case, immediately after birth, is plunged into cold water, is not perhaps a conscious method of eliminating the weak, though it must operate in that direction. At a later period of life should any disease believed to be infectious break out in a tribe, " those attacked by it are immediately left, even by their closest relatives, the house is abandoned, and possibly even burnt.
Such derelict houses are no uncommon sight in the forest, grimly desolate mementoes of possible
tragedies." When a person becomes insane, he is first of all exorcised by the medicine man, and
if that fails is put to death by poison by the same functionary. The sick are dealt with on similar lines, unless there is or seems to be a probability of speedy recovery. " Cases of chronic illness meet with no sympathy from the Indians. A man who cannot hunt or fight is regarded as useless, he is merely a burden on the community."
Under these circumstances he is either left at home untended or hunted out into the bush to
die, or his end is accelerated by the medicine man.
The same fate awaits the aged, unless they seem to be of value to the tribe on account of their
wisdom and experience.
All these things placed together give us a perfect picture of life under Natural Selection,
and having studied it we may fairly ask whether such a rule of life is one under which any one of us would like to live. In every respect it is the antipodes of the Christian rule of life, and of that rule of life which civilised countries, whether in fact Christian or not, have derived from
Christianity and still practise. The non-Christian rule of the Indians is one under which might is right and no real individual liberty exists, all personal rights being sacrificed to the supposed needs and benefit of the community.
So much from the point of view of Natural Selection, but it would appear that those who
have given up that factor as of anything but a very minor value, if even that, have also their
rule of life founded on their interpretation of
Nature. Thus Professor Bateson, the great exponent of Mendel's doctrines, who has told us
in his Presidential Address to the British Association that we must think much less highly of
Natural Selection than some would have us do, has, as has been set forth in the previous section
of this essay, his opinion as to the rule of life which we should follow.
Professor Conklyn, an American enthusiast for extreme eugenistic views, has also set down in
print his ideas as to the lines on which our lives are to be run under a scientific domination, and these are to be dealt with in another article.'
His scheme entails a forcible visit, not, it may be supposed, to the Altar, but to the Registry Office, for all persons held to be fit to perpetuate the race, and forcible restraint, whether by imprisonment or by sterilisation, for all others.
The first thing which all these essays towards a scientific conduct of life reveal is a total want of perspective, for they proceed on the hypothesis which no doubt their authors would defend—that this world and its concerns are everything, and that the intellectual and physical improvement of the human race by any measures, however harsh, is the " one thing needful." But beyond this the persons who hold such views seem to have entirely overlooked the fact that their proposed State would be one conducted on principles of the bitterest and most galling slavery imaginable by the mind of man, a form of slavery that never could persist if for a moment it be conceded that it could ever come into operation. The fact is that the whole thing is ludicrous when looked at from the point of view of common sense, but how few take the trouble' to contemplate these schemes as they would be in operation ! ' Were they thus to contemplate them, they would see that, apart altogether from any religious considerations, they are wholly impossible, even from a purely political point of view. That such ideas are intolerable to Catholic minds, indeed to any Christian mind, goes without saying.
Driesch (Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. ii., p. 358) has pointed out very clearly that " the mechanical theory of life is incompatible with morality," and that it is impossible to feel" morally " towards other individuals if one knows that they are machines and nothing more.
Again, Professor Henslow (in Present Day Rationalism Critically Examined, p. 253) very pertinently asks those who discard all religious considerations and claim to rely for guidance on the lessons of Nature, " If you have no taste for virtue, why be virtuous at all, so long as you do not violate the laws of the land ? "
Yet, in the face of these surely obvious facts, we find persons making such absurd claims as that
made in a recent book by Rignano, an Italian writer (Essays in Scientific Synthesis, 19T7). It is not often that one meets a book so full of philosophical fallacies as this. " We are certain of one fact," he says, " that the only organ actually brought into play to fight immorality is the organ of the collective conscience and not the religious organ."
I suppose no more ludicrously inaccurate remark ever was set down in print ; for, to begin with, the" collective conscience," whatever that may be, does not exist in Nature, teste the farmyard and the fowl-run ; and again, whatever force is connoted by those words' must have been set agoing-by what ? By Nature ? Oh, most emphatically no ! Nature has no law against immorality ;
there is no Categorical Imperative in Nature commanding us to be chaste or kindly or considerate or even just. We must go elsewhere if we are to look for teaching in the virtues.
That is the fact that we must keep clearly before our minds when endeavouring to estimate at
their proper value the nostrums of writers such as those with whose works we have been dealing.
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