Part 1 (1/2)

The Destiny of Man.

by John Fiske.

PREFACE.

Having been invited to give an address before the Concord School of Philosophy this summer, upon some subject relating to the question of immortality there under discussion, it seemed a proper occasion for putting together the following thoughts on the origin of Man and his place in the universe. In dealing with the unknown, it is well to take one's start a long way within the limits of the known. The question of a future life is generally regarded as lying outside the range of legitimate scientific discussion. Yet while fully admitting this, one does not necessarily admit that the subject is one with regard to which we are forever debarred from entertaining an opinion. Now our opinions on such transcendental questions must necessarily be affected by the total ma.s.s of our opinions on the questions which lie within the scope of scientific inquiry; and from this point of view it becomes of surpa.s.sing interest to trace the career of Humanity within that segment of the universe which is accessible to us. The teachings of the doctrine of evolution as to the origin and destiny of Man have, moreover, a very great speculative and practical value of their own, quite apart from their bearings upon any ultimate questions. The body of this essay is accordingly devoted to setting forth these teachings in what I conceive to be their true light; while their transcendental implications are reserved for the sequel.

As the essay contains an epitome of my own original contributions to the doctrine of evolution, I have added at the end a short list of references to other works of mine, where the points here briefly mentioned are more fully argued and ill.u.s.trated. The views regarding the progress of human society, and the elimination of warfare, are set forth at greater length in a little book now in the press, and soon to appear, ent.i.tled ”American Political Ideas.”

PETERSHAM, September 6, 1884.

THE DESTINY OF MAN.

I.

Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the Copernican Theory.

When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante--that wonderful book wherein all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse--we are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of reasoning about the facts of nature which seem strange to us to-day, but from the influence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology c.u.mbrous in its obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe wherein all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land,--all for the blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among G.o.d's creatures, Man. Upon some such conception as this, indeed, all theology would seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone Humanity, regard it as a mere local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes, and you arrive at a doctrine which, under whatever specious name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism.

On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably a.s.sociated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular theory of light or Sir G.C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We are wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing. Our moral sense revolts against it no less than our intelligence; and this is because, on its practical side, Atheism would remove Humanity from its peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its lot with the gra.s.s that withers and the beasts that perish; and thus the rich and varied life of the universe, in all the ages of its wondrous duration, becomes deprived of any such element of purpose as can make it intelligible to us or appeal to our moral sympathies and religious aspirations.

And yet the first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable truths of modern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended, has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate and trivial position; and it is because of this mistaken view of their import that the Church has so often and so bitterly opposed the teaching of such truths. With the advent of the Copernican astronomy the funnel-shaped Inferno, the steep mountain of Purgatory crowned with its terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres of Heaven wherein beatified saints held weird and subtle converse, all went their way to the limbo prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, whither Hades and Valhalla had gone before them. In our day it is hard to realize the startling effect of the discovery that Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up our galaxy. To the contemporaries of Copernicus the new theory seemed to strike at the very foundations of Christian theology. In a universe where so much had been made without discernible reference to Man, what became of that elaborate scheme of salvation which seemed to rest upon the a.s.sumption that the career of Humanity was the sole object of G.o.d's creative forethought and fostering care? When we bear this in mind, we see how natural and inevitable it was that the Church should persecute such men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same time it is instructive to observe that, while the Copernican astronomy has become firmly established in spite of priestly opposition, the foundations of Christian theology have not been shaken thereby. It is not that the question which once so sorely puzzled men has ever been settled, but that it has been outgrown. The speculative necessity for man's occupying the largest and most central spot in the universe is no longer felt. It is recognized as a primitive and childish notion. With our larger knowledge we see that these vast and fiery suns are after all but the t.i.tan like _servants_ of the little planets which they bear with them in their flight through the abysses of s.p.a.ce. Out from the awful gaseous turmoil of the central ma.s.s dart those ceaseless waves of gentle radiance that, when caught upon the surface of whirling worlds like ours, bring forth the endlessly varied forms and the endlessly complex movements that make up what we can see of life. And as when G.o.d revealed himself to his ancient prophet He came not in the earthquake or the tempest but in a voice that was still and small, so that divine spark the Soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of the sixteenth century may well smile at the quaint conceit that man cannot be the object of G.o.d's care unless he occupies an immovable position in the centre of the stellar universe.

II.

Man's Place in Nature, as affected by Darwinism.

When the Copernican astronomy was finally established through the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, it might well have been p.r.o.nounced the greatest scientific achievement of the human mind; but it was still more than that. It was the greatest revolution that had ever been effected in Man's views of his relations to the universe in which he lives, and of which he is--at least during the present life--a part. During the nineteenth century, however, a still greater revolution has been effected. Not only has Lyell enlarged our mental horizon in time as much as Newton enlarged it in s.p.a.ce, but it appears that throughout these vast stretches of time and s.p.a.ce with which we have been made acquainted there are sundry well-marked changes going on. Certain definite paths of development are being pursued; and around us on every side we behold worlds, organisms, and societies in divers stages of progress or decline. Still more, as we examine the records of past life upon our globe, and study the mutual relations of the living things that still remain, it appears that the higher forms of life--including Man himself--are the modified descendants of lower forms. Zoologically speaking, Man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself.

We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes--different genera of the cat-family--are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyaenas, bears, and seals; so the various genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels. Such is the conclusion to which the scientific world has come within a quarter of a century from the publication of Mr. Darwin's ”Origin of Species;” and there is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men.

It is not strange that this theory of man's origin, which we a.s.sociate mainly with the name of Mr. Darwin, should be to many people very unwelcome. It is fast bringing about a still greater revolution in thought than that which was heralded by Copernicus; and it naturally takes some time for the various portions of one's theory of things to become adjusted, one after another, to so vast and sweeping a change.

From many quarters the cry goes up,--If this be true, then Man is at length cast down from his high position in the world. ”I will not be called a mammal, or the son of a mammal!” once exclaimed an acquaintance of mine who perhaps had been brought up by hand. Such expressions of feeling are crude, but the feeling is not unjustifiable. It is urged that if man is physically akin to a baboon, as pigs are akin to horses, and cows to deer, then Humanity can in nowise be regarded as occupying a peculiar place in the universe; it becomes a mere incident in an endless series of changes, and how can we say that the same process of evolution that has produced mankind may not by and by produce something far more perfect? There was a time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been ”sealed within the iron hills” there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever? In such case, why should we regard Man as in any higher sense the object of Divine care than a pig? Still stronger does the case appear when we remember that those countless adaptations of means to ends in nature, which since the time of Voltaire and Paley we have been accustomed to cite as evidences of creative design, have received at the hands of Mr.

Darwin a very different interpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the b.u.t.terfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonis.h.i.+ng structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance. That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is a.n.a.logous to the ingenuity of human art. The infinite and eternal Power which is thus revealed in the physical life of the universe seems in nowise akin to the human soul. The idea of beneficent purpose seems for the moment to be excluded from nature, and a blind process, known as Natural Selection, is the deity that slumbers not nor sleeps. Reckless of good and evil, it brings forth at once the mother's tender love for her infant and the horrible teeth of the ravening shark, and to its creative indifference the one is as good as the other.

In spite of these appalling arguments the man of science, urged by the single-hearted purpose to ascertain the truth, be the consequences what they may, goes quietly on and finds that the terrible theory must be adopted; the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts must be admitted. In reaching this conclusion, the man of science reasons upon the physical facts within his reach, applying to them the same principles of common-sense whereby our everyday lives are successfully guided; and he is very apt to smile at the methods of those people who, taking hold of the question at the wrong end, begin by arguing about all manner of fancied consequences. For his knowledge of the history of human thinking a.s.sures him that such methods have through all past time proved barren of aught save strife, while his own bold yet humble method is the only one through which truth has ever been elicited. To pursue unflinchingly the methods of science requires dauntless courage and a faith that nothing can shake. Such courage and such loyalty to nature brings its own reward. For when once the formidable theory is really understood, when once its implications are properly unfolded, it is seen to have no such logical consequences as were at first ascribed to it. As with the Copernican astronomy, so with the Darwinian biology, we rise to a higher view of the workings of G.o.d and of the nature of Man than was ever attainable before. So far from degrading Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the Darwinian theory shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has all the while been tending.

It enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, places it upon even a loftier eminence than poets or prophets have imagined, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of that creative activity which is manifested in the physical universe.

III.

On the Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man.

In elucidating these points, we may fitly begin by considering the question as to the possibility of the evolution of any higher creature than Man, to whom the dominion over this earth shall pa.s.s. The question will best be answered by turning back and observing one of the most remarkable features connected with the origin of Man and with his superiority over other animals. And let it be borne in mind that we are not now about to wander through the regions of unconditional possibility. We are not dealing with vague general notions of development, but with the scientific Darwinian theory, which alleges development only as the result of certain rigorously defined agencies.