John Fiske - The Destiny of Man
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THE DESTINY OF MAN
VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF HIS ORIGIN
BY
JOHN FISKE
TWENTIETH EDITION.
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
1893
Copyright, 1884,
BY JOHN FISKE.
TO
MY CHILDREN,
MAUD, HAROLD, CLARENCE, RALPH, ETHEL, AND HERBERT,
This Essay
_IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED._
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 mass of our opinions on the questions which lie within the scope
of scientific inquiry; and from this point of view it becomes of
surpassing 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 illustrated. 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,
entitled "American Political Ideas."
PETERSHAM, September 6, 1884.
CONTENTS.
I. Man's Place in Nature as affected by the Copernican Theory.
II. As affected by Darwinism.
III. On the Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man.
IV. The Origin of Infancy.
V. The Dawning of Consciousness.
VI. Lengthening of Infancy and Concomitant Increase of Brain-Surface.
VII. Change in the Direction of the Working of Natural Selection.
VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life.
IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality.
X. Improvableness of Man.
XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men.
XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilisation.
XIII. Methods of Political Development, and Elimination of Warfare.
XIV. End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off
the Brute-Inheritance.
XV. The Message of Christianity.
XVI. The Question as to a Future Life.
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 cumbrous 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 God'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 associated 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
grass 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 assumption that the career of Humanity was
the sole object of God'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 Titan like _servants_ of the little planets which they bear with
them in their flight through the abysses of space. Out from the awful
gaseous turmoil of the central mass 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 God 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 God'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 pronounced 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 space, but it appears that throughout these
vast stretches of time and space 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. Zooelogically
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 associate
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
butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the
architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing 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
analogous 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 assures 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 God 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 pass. 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.
The chief among these agencies is Natural Selection. It has again and
again been illustrated how by the cumulative selection and inheritance
of slight physical variations generic differences, like those between
the tiger and the leopard, or the cow and the antelope, at length arise;
and the guiding principle in the accumulation of slight physical
differences has been the welfare of the species. The variant forms on
either side have survived while the constant forms have perished, so
that the lines of demarcation between allied species have grown more and
more distinct, and it is usually only by going back to fossil ages that
we can supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle
for existence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has
been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance; and
the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life
illustrate the seeming capriciousness of its workings. Psychical
variations have never been unimportant since the appearance of the first
faint pigment-spot which by and by was to translate touch into vision,
as it developed into the lenses and humours of the eye.[2] Special
organs of sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were
slowly developed through countless ages, in company with purely physical
variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of
stomach, or thickness of hide. At length there came a wonderful
moment--silent and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great
revolutions. Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which
cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at
which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to
the brute ancestor of Man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle
the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener
in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until by
and by the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of
structure increased a thousand-fold, while in other respects his
appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.[3]
Along with this growth of the brain, the complete assumption of the
upright posture, enabling the hands to be devoted entirely to prehension
and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooeperated
in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief
distinguishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes
derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual
changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these
intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance,
psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as
to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of
evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor's first
appearance. No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this
two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical
divergence between Man and the group of animals to which he traces his
pedigree. It shows that when Humanity began to be evolved an entirely
new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the
life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily
life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this
direction at least, the process of zooelogical change had come to an end,
and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth
along this supreme line of generation there was to be no further
evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the
accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be
indefinitely perfected and raised to a totally different plane from that
on which all life had hitherto existed. Henceforth, in short, the
dominant aspect of evolution was to be not the genesis of species, but
the progress of Civilization.
As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of all this, we see that upon the
Darwinian theory it is impossible that any creature zoologically
distinct from Man and superior to him should ever at any future time
exist upon the earth. In the regions of unconditional possibility it is
open to any one to argue, if he chooses, that such a creature may come
to exist; but the Darwinian theory is utterly opposed to any such
conclusion. According to Darwinism, the creation of Man is still the
goal toward which Nature tended from the beginning. Not the production
of any higher creature, but the perfecting of Humanity, is to be the
glorious consummation of Nature's long and tedious work. Thus we
suddenly arrive at the conclusion that Man seems now, much more clearly
than ever, the chief among God's creatures. On the primitive barbaric
theory, which Mr. Darwin has swept away, Man was suddenly flung into the
world by the miraculous act of some unseen and incalculable Power acting
from without; and whatever theology might suppose, no scientific reason
could be alleged why the same incalculable Power might not at some
future moment, by a similar miracle, thrust upon the scene some mightier
creature in whose presence Man would become like a sorry beast of
burden. But he who has mastered the Darwinian theory, he who recognizes
the slow and subtle process of evolution as the way in which God makes
things come to pass, must take afar higher view. He sees that in the
deadly struggle for existence which has raged throughout countless aeons
of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in
order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of God's handiwork,
the Human Soul.
To the creature thus produced through a change in the direction in which
natural selection has worked, the earth and most of its living things
have become gradually subordinated. In all the classes of the animal and
vegetal worlds many ancient species have become extinct, and many modern
species have come into being, through the unchecked working of natural
selection, since Man became distinctively human. But in this respect a
change has long been coming over the face of nature. The destinies of
all other living things are more and more dependent upon the will of
Man. It rests with him to determine, to a great degree, what plants and
animals shall remain upon the earth and what shall be swept from its
surface. By unconsciously imitating the selective processes of Nature,
he long ago wrought many wild species into forms subservient to his
needs. He has created new varieties of fruit and flower and cereal
grass, and has reared new breeds of animals to aid him in the work of
civilization; until at length he is beginning to acquire a mastery over
mechanical and molecular and chemical forces which is doubtless destined
in the future to achieve marvellous results whereof today we little
dream. Natural selection itself will by and by occupy a subordinate
place in comparison with selection by Man, whose appearance on the earth
is thus seen more clearly than ever to have opened an entirely new
chapter in the mysterious history of creation.
IV.
The Origin of Infancy.
But before we can fully understand the exalted position which the
Darwinian theory assigns to man, another point demands consideration.
The natural selection of psychical peculiarities does not alone account
for the origin of Man, or explain his most signal difference from all
other animals. That difference is unquestionably a difference in kind,
but in saying this one must guard against misunderstanding. Not only in
the world of organic life, but throughout the known universe, the
doctrine of evolution regards differences in kind as due to the gradual
accumulation of differences in degree. To cite a very simple case, what
differences of kind can be more striking than the differences between a
nebula, a sun, a planet like the earth, and a planet like our moon? Yet
these things are simply examples of cosmical matter at four different
stages of cooling. The physical differences between steam, water, and
ice afford a more familiar example. In the organic world the perpetual
modification of structures that has been effected through natural
selection exhibits countless instances of differences in kind which have
risen from the accumulation of differences in degree. No one would
hesitate to call a horse's hoof different in kind from a cat's paw; and
yet the horse's lower leg and hoof are undoubtedly developed from a
five-toed paw. The most signal differences in kind are wont to arise
when organs originally developed for a certain purpose come to be
applied to a very different purpose, as that change of the fish's
air-bladder into a lung which accompanied the first development of land
vertebrates. But still greater becomes the revolution when a certain
process goes on Until it sets going a number of other processes,
unlocking series after series of causal agencies until a vast and
complicated result is reached, such as could by no possibility have been
foreseen. The creation of Man was one of these vast and complicated
results due to the unlocking of various series of causal agencies; and
it was the beginning of a deeper and mightier difference in kind than
any that slowly evolving Nature had yet witnessed.