Evolution and social progress

Table Of Contents

DepicaTION—To THE CLASSES AND THE Masses

CHAPTER

I Il IV

Chapter I Sapping The Social Foundations

UT now really, tell me, between ourselves, B Ivan: Does God exist—yes or no?”

Such is the question asked in a modern play, a harrowing dramatization of a gruesome Russian novel. The questioner himself is a sinister old man, a repulsive sensualist, whose fortune has been wasted in unrestrained self-indulgence. Ivan, his son, from whom he seeks an answer which he hopes will allay his fears, is an advanced radical, whose intellectual training has left him an atheist and a cynic. He is the consistent product of a rationalistic education.

“No, God does not exist,” comes the cold reply, as Ivan leans upon his elbow and stares at his father in disgust.

“Ts that right?” the old man eagerly queries. “And immortality? Is there such a thing?”

Again the curt, monosyllabic reply: “No.”

, I

There is a visible feeling of relief on the part of the hoary transgressor of the laws of God as he earnestly urges his questions and finally presses the answers to their logical conclusion.

‘Are you sure, my little Ivan? You are not making fun of me? No immortality—not the least scrap of immortality?”

“Nothing!”

“That is to say—an absolute zero? Not even the fraction of a fraction?”

“Absolute zero!”

“But then—then—everything is permitted! Ivan, everything is allowable?”

“Yes, father, everything is permitted.”

“Hush—let’s not say that aloud. Let us keep that as our secret, my son.”

There is the terrible logic that has produced the lust and cruelty, the bloodshed and injustice of the modern as of the ancient paganism. The practical conclusions of that same reasoning on the part of the rich have been the oppressive industrialism and the godless excesses of ill-gotten wealth; while on the part of the poor they have led to the deeds of anarchism and the orgies of bloody revolutions. From this same argument were begotten the Nietzschean madness and the uolshevist dream with its awakening in hunger, loot and murder: a new tyranny for the old.

If there is no God then everything is permissible, everything is allowable. Nothing more

SAPPING THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS 3 is required than the mere power to carry out our desires. There is no conscience any longer to stay the passions of men, their greed or immorality; for there is no one to whom henceforth they are held accountable? Hence the counsel of the hoary sensualist in the Russian novel who wished indeed to draw this conclusion for himself alone that it might not be applied against him in turn: “Let’s not say that aloud. Let us keep that as our secret.”

But it is not included in the devil’s program that this logical conclusion from the atheist’s premises, wrongly said to be based upon natural science, should ever be kept secret. It is too serviceable for his purpose.

Why should laborers not be anarchists, I. W. W., Nihilists or Bolsheviki, if there were no God, and these plans and methods promised them the control of wealth which they are determined to acquire? Why should capitalists not be extortioners and profiteers?

Admit the false premise that there is no God, and we may well defy all the universities in the world to point out any flaw in the argument: “Then everything is permitted, Ivan, everything is allowable.” Everything is allowable! There would then be no punishment hereafter for sin and no reward for virtue.

Here we have sounded the depth of capitalist injustice and of labor revolution; we have touched on the bedrock of the modern social problem as well as of countless other questions for which there will be no solution until religion is restored to the hearts of men.

If there is no God, no immortality, then everything is permitted, everything is allowable. That is the pith and kernel of the entire atheist philosophy when reduced to practice. Only see to it that no one shall detect you, or no one can bring youto harm. Such was the law of paganism, and such will again be the law wherever religion is ignored.

The traditions of our day are still, we must remember, the traditions of Christianity. Their influence cannot at once be eradicated. It is felt even by those who ignore them entirely. But given a godless education for generations to come, and these traditions also would disappear from the minds of the masses within the nation which had thus blindly offended against reason and sinned against God. Unaided by religion, the natural law will in practice be too weak to withstand the violent assaults of passion and the promptings of an unholy selfishness. Logically indeed, we cannot even admit the existence of a natural moral law, that man could be bound to obey, if there were no God. The obligation of obedience cannot come from a blind nature, but only from a living Creator. We must return, in

SAPPING THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS 5, brief, to the conclusion that everything would be permitted, everything allowable.

Without soul, without God, man were but a brute among his fellow brutes. Who then could demand from him obedience to any law save that of fear only? Who then could ask of him the observance of any code of morality, save selfinterest. The gratification of his instincts, when _ not prevented by outward force or peril, would be his only law. We would in fact be obliged to proceed much further, and deny him all freedom of will, as the materialists have most consistently done. With the cessation of free will all accountability is gone. Punishments and rewards are then both absurdities, as certain materialistic sociologists entirely admit, and as all should admit if they were logical. There can be no patriotism, no loyalty, no virtue, no crime. The moral order would have come to its end.

Such, then, would be the fate of a world blinding its eyes to the evidence of the truth, and with the fool exclaiming in its heart: ‘There is no God.” The law of the jungle could be the only law of the land and the law of the nations in their dealing with each other. We have gone a great way in this direction. We must go the full length if we would accept as true the basis of most modern sociology, which is nothing else than materialistic evolution.

There are two kinds of evolutionary theories, let it be said at once and made perfectly clear. They may be described respectively as scientific and materialistic evolution.

The former deals with well established facts and probable theories. Its conclusions are not wider than its premises. It is scrupulously careful to distinguish between undeniable evidence, gathered from nature, and mere theories, resting upon what is at the best a likelihood. It finally remains strictly within its own sphere, and is therefore truly scientific. The latter disregards completely the limits of its scientific province, and leaps into the foreign realm of metaphysics and religion with which, as physical science, it is wholly incompetent to deal. In place of facts it substitutes unproved fancies and unprovable theories, converting them into dogmas and creeds. Its openly avowed purpose is to destroy from the hearts of men every vestige of a Personal Creator.

Many doubtless there are who accept it as the sole alternative of admitting the existence of a Divine Power. Thus M. Yves Delage, a scientist of no slight significance and professor of the Sorbonne, thus clearly states his own attitude:

I can easily admit that one species has never been seen to give rise to, or to be transformed into another, and that it cannot be formally proved ever to have done so. I am now speaking of a real and true species, fixed as natural species, and like them maintaining itself without human assistance. Much more, of course, is all this true of genus.

Yet I consider descent [understood here as materialistic evoly-

SAPPING THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS 7 tion] as certain a fact as if it were objectively proved, for without it there is no other possible hypothesis than that of spontaneous generation of all species, even of the higher orders, and that of their creation by some Divine power?

Spontaneous generation cannot be scientifically accepted, as we fully agree with him. There consequently remains but the alternative of materialistic evolution or Creation. Because he will not accept the latter, he is driven to admit the former, not merely without proof, as he confessed, but against the testimony of reason itself. This is a point we shall later conclusively show. But what are we to think of a school of scientists who allow themselves to be blindly swayed by convictions which are in no way based upon physical science, but upon atheistic philosophy alone? For in his confession M. Yves Delage implicates the whole school of materialistic evolutionists—those, that is, who assert evolution without God to be a certainty, while at the same time they are obliged to admit that their assertion lies entirely beyond the realm of proof, that in other words, it is merely a subterfuge to escape the inevitable fact of a Creator God. Says M. Yves Delage:

I am however absolutely convinced that a man supports or does not support transformism [again understood as materialistic evolution], not for reasons taken from natural history, but because of his philosophical views. If there were any other

1Qa Structure du Protoplasma et les Théories sur lHérédité, p. 184. See Cardinal Mercier, “The Origins of Contemporary Psychology,” pp. 316-319. Professor Kellogg, it may be noted, follows the same line of argument.

scientific hypothesis than that of descent to explain the origin of species, a number of transformists would give up their present opinions as insufficiently proved.’

Compare with this the scientific attitude of the Catholic scientist who, without fear or hesitation, is willing to admit evolution precisely so far as it can be established by fact. His Faith does not impede his researches but preserves him from rash deductions, and may often point the right way where science has no final answer to give. He approaches his investigation unhampered by any prejudice, with no eagerness for anything except to ascertain the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth. The fear that this truth can ever, even in the slightest detail, conflict with his faith will never enter the mind of the real Catholic scientist, who has been trained to welcome every fact of science without reserve or suspicion—provided that it is a fact and not a mere hypothesis which may be changed tomorrow. His unshaken belief in a Creator merely rounds out and completes his knowledge, giving logical consistency to all his thought. It does not obstruct, but perfects his vision. Nothing is more wide of the truth than the assumption that physics and metaphysics, when both pursued in a truly scientific way, can ever be in the slightest conflict with one another. Here, in brief, is the logical argument of Christian metaphysics, as pithily and authoritatively

? Ibid.

SAPPING THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS 9 stated by one who was honored for his learning no less than for his patriotism by many of our greatest secular universities, Cardinal Mercier:

Man and external beings are contingent—i.¢., in none of them does essence imply existence—and nevertheless they exist. Hence there is something which has brought them into existence. If this cause were itself contingent, it would not altogether resolve the problem of their existence, because it must have a cause for itself. Therefore contingent existence must have a cause that is itself non-contingent, necessary—by which we mean that its essence is identical with its existence.

Therefore it is on the ground of experience that the existence of a necessary Being is affirmed. Reason compels us to choose between affirming the existence of God or else maintaining an essential contradiction at the very heart of that contingent being, the existence of which we have ascertained.’

Either this, or chaos, both in the intellectual and the moral world! There is no deduction of science that can be claimed to be more reasonable, none that can be more imperative than the first conclusion here arrived at, affirming “‘the existence of a necessary Being.” At the same time it in no way encroaches upon the domain of any of the natural sciences, but accepting all the facts they have discovered, or may yet discover, it finds in them only a firmer warrant for its logical necessity and indisputable truth.

Even Kant could not fail to acknowledge the logical necessity of these conclusions when he wrote:

*“The Origins of Contemporary Psychology,” pp. 314, 315.

It is impossible to contemplate the fabric of the world without recognizing the certain manifestations of the hand of God in the perfection of its correlations. Reason, when once it has considered and admired so much beauty and so much perfection, feels a just indignation at the dauntless folly which dares to ascribe all this to chance and a happy accident. It must be that the highest wisdom conceived the plan, and infinite power carried it into execution. All things which set forth reciprocal harmonies in nature must be bound together in a single Existence on which they collectively depend. Thus there exists a Being of all beings, an infinite Understanding and a self-existent Wisdom, from which nature, in the whole aggregate of her correlations, derives existence. It is not allowable to maintain that the activity of nature is prejudicial to the existence of a highest Being. The perfection of its development, the order and harmony of its laws, give conclusive demonstra tion of the Godhead from whom these relations are derived.*

The various statements made in this chapter call for further explanation and proof, such as shall be abundantly given in the following chapters. There is no antagonism between true science and true religion. And here it may at once be plainly declared by the writer that in the many years spent by him in the study of social questions, or in lectures upon social topics, whether in university classrooms or in the public forum, experience has daily borne in more strongly upon his mind the conviction that the immediate cause of our present evils must be sought mainly in the vast and world-wide propaganda carried on in the interest of an untenable materialistic evolution. Mr. Loeb well expressed the animus of this mowee

“Translation quoted in Detroit Journal, Oct. 15, 1917.

SAPPING THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS Il snent when he said in the Nation: “The theories of evolution cannot be considered as an addition to our knowledge, since they are not based upon experiments, although they have acted as a valuable stimulus‘in the revolt against Church authority.” ® Its promoters, with most admirable energy but most unscientific deductions, allowed themselves neither rest nor respite until their dogmas, wholly unproyable, dominated the press, the school, and almost every channel of public information. Here is the direct historic reason, after the rejection of the Church, for the godlessness of the people and their rulers, in which our social evils are ultimately rooted.

CHARTER 11

N CAREFUL perusal of modern social literature cannot fail to impress the intel-

ligent Christian reader with the fact that

the root of all our social errors is to be found in the dogma of materialistic evolution. The philosophy of Socialism is merely an application of it. Society is explained as a series of inevitable evolutions that began with the lowest forms of animal life and continued to the present day, according to strictly economic laws. Every form of modern institution, the Church included, is said to have been determined mainly by economic conditions. Historic materialism is the name quite properly given by its authors to this Socialist creed. The same dogma of materialistic evolution, accepted in a wider sense, is the first principle of practically all the purely secular social literature of our day. It is equally popular with Communist, anarchist and rationalistic capitalist. So completely has this new doctrine of evolution without God obsessed the mind of the przsent generation that it is almost impossible to take up a handbook of economics, sociology, meer

ees x | E

* o oe i Pere Od i % science or philosophy, used in our public schools and in our universities, in which this lowest form of materialism is not an accepted dogma. ‘There is more ineffable rot being taught in the universities of the United States,” rightly said Senator Sherman in a debate on the literacy test, ‘than can be found in the whole of the ignorant slums of the entire world.” The same is true of the universities of other lands. Never perhaps were so many vital truths ignored, never was sound learning less in honor, never was investigation carried on in a more partisan and less unbiased spirit, never was superstition enthroned in the place of religion with such fatal consequences as in the years preceding the World War.

We still remember the well-justified charges brought against American colleges by Harold Bolce, in 1910. His conclusions were drawn only after he had attended lectures in more than a hundred of the secular institutions of higher learning, and the lectures heard by him were for the most part merely the echoes of what was then being taught throughout the universities of Europe. Here is the editorial summary that pre-

«faced his article:

Those who are not in close touch with the colleges of the country will be astonished to learn the creeds being fostered by the faculties of our great universities. In hundreds of classrooms it is being taught daily that the decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus;, that the home as an institution is doomed; that there are no absolute evils; that immorality is simply an act in controvention of society’s standards; that democracy is a failure and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric; that the change from one religion to another is like getting a new hat; that moral precepts are passing shibboleths; that conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress; that wide stair-ways are open between social levels, but that to the climber children are an encumbrance; that the sole effect of prolificacy is to fill tiny graves, and that there can be and are holier alliances without the marriage bond than within it.*

That there was no exaggeration in these statements every one acquainted with the teachings of these universities knows perfectlly well. All these conclusions regarding the most sacred institutions, and the most fundamental moral principles, naturally flow from the prime doctrine of materialistic evolution. They would all be true if this original premise were not itself false as the father of lies. This we shall easily and fully make clear in the present volume, arguing from the standpoint of science itself and from the standpoint of scientific evolution, which we have not the slightest desire to oppose or antagonize. We are concerned with facts alone and shall enable the reader to form his unprejudiced decision.

But with doctrines such as the above submitted with academic warrant to the minds of hundreds of thousands of students, not in the United States only, but in England no less and on the continent of Europe; with the professed guardians of the

+“Blasting at the Rock of Ages.” Bolce’s articles originally appeared in the Cosmopolitan.

founts of learning babbling over and over again the same old, unproven Haeckelian lessons, until they were learned by rote, can we wonder that the nations should have been ripe for the cataclysm of the World War, for the Spartacan and Bolshevist outbreaks, for the excesses of a Bela Kun and a Trotzky following in the wake of Marx and Ferrer. Yet these were merely premonitions of the things to come if a sounder and more scientific basis is not laid for our learning. . They who sow the storm must reap the whirlwind.

Our entire view of life will obviously take shape and color according as we admit or reject a Divine plan. Nothing could be more childish than to imagine that evolution can disprove the existence of God. In the order of pure reason it could merely postpone the difficulty which the evolutionist so painfully and futilely seeks to avoid: “And who then gave the laws of evolution?’ Only a mind distorted and distraught could fancy the ordered beauty of nature and the marvel of human life, with its mystery of reproduction, as existent without an intelligent primal and directive cause. This can evidently not be contingent, like the material universe about us, but must be a simple, immaterial, necessary being.

Whether civilization is ever to attain closer to its ideal perfection, or in spite of all its material culture or kultur is to sink ever deeper into the mire of lewd passions and brutal instincts, as did ancient Greece and Rome before their fall, depends entirely upon its belief in the truths of Revelation, as preceded by the invincible evidences of reason, or its acceptance instead of the irrational dogma taught in thousands of the schools and universities of our day. If man is a brute in origin, with but one and the same destiny as the brute, why should he not live like the brute?

The first logical consequence of the acceptance of the dogma of materialistic evolution is the denial of the free will. If nothing exists except matter and force, there can obviously be no moral liberty. Physical laws or chemical actions and reactions can clearly possess no freedom. So human agents could be no more virtuous or criminal than the wind and the waste sea when they drown the wrecked sailor or toss him about on the floating log and wash him to the shore. We should then heartily agree with Enrico Ferri, when he proclaims “the palpable refutations by physio-psychology of the presupposition of free choice or moral liberty,’ and declares “the theoretical and practical impossibility of resting man’s responsibility for his crimes upon free choice, either absolute or relative.” *

It is true that evolution is not the only argument advanced for these theories, but it is the \basic argument. It is moreover the only logical and conclusive argument that would necessitate

? “Criminal Sociology,” p. 308.

SOWING THE STORM Iz the denial of free will, once its false evolutionary premises were accepted. Thus when Ferri strives to prove statistically that ‘“‘there is no free will” by the argument that “those human acts which are believed to be more free morally, such as marriages, suicides, crimes or emigrations, were on the contrary subject to the influences of environment and varied with these influences,” for the sake of argument we can readily grant the entire statement. It does not disprove the existence of free will. It merely illustrates the fact that men, being similarly constituted, will under the same conditions ordinarily make the same choice when this recommends itself to their intelligence by intrinsic reasons, or else exercises a strong natural appeal on their senses. The impossibility of acting otherwise does not follow. It is easy in practice to prove the contrary in our own case. It is the dogma of materialistic evolution only, as taught in the godless schools of our day, that postulates the denial of a free will.

Admitting materialistic evolution there is no escape from the further conclusion that human responsibility is merely an idle phrase. “Not Guilty” is the title given by Robert Blatchford to one of his ultra-radical productions. The name itself is meant to indicate at once the verdict passed by him upon the criminal behind the prison bars. Men are what heredity and environment make them, is the substance of this doctrine of penology; free will is non-existent, blame and punishment are unjust and unreasonable. Nothing then remains to be done except to change the environment and so overcome the taint of heredity. He plainly says:

If our heredity and environment be good, we must act well, we cannot help it; if it be ill, we must act ill, we cannot help it. Suppose a tramp has murdered a child on the highway, has robbed her of a few coppers and has thrown her body into a ditch: Do you mean to say that tramp could not help doing that? Do you mean he is not to blame—not to be punished?

Yes, I mean to say all these things, and if all these things are not true, this book is not worth the paper it is written on.

Admirably logical! And if all this is not true then neither is materialistic evolution worth being taught in our universities. Free will, as Haeckel himself clearly admits, and as every materialistic evolutionist must admit, is made impossible by it, since human thoughts, our supposed resolutions and outward actions can then be no more than the result of physical laws and chemical actions, which are not free but necessary in the strictest sense. No fine-spun explanations can change this conclusion. For, says Haeckel, ‘“‘The various phenomena of nature [whether those we are accustomed to call mental or those we know to be material] differ in the degree of complexity only in which the different forces work together.” * No degree of complexity in a chemical reaction can

*“Not Guilty.” *“The Evolution of Man.”

leave free will as its residue at the bottom of a test tube, no matter to what degree of Fahrenheit you may have raised its contents. No more can it produce this same result in the human compound. Haeckel is right in denying free will if there is nothing in the universe but matter and force; and equally right is Blatchford on that same supposition when he draws from it the inescapable conclusion that no criminal, no matter how vile and abhorrent his deeds, should ever be judged because of them. ‘Considered purely as results of physical laws and chemical reactions, are they not just as admirable as the highest acts of virtue? Yet if the accepted teaching of an irreligious education is correct, if matter and force are all, if materialistic evolution is the ultimate word, then surely they are nothing more than that.

Although no criminal, therefore, must then be considered guilty, yet for the good of society, it is thought by Blatchford, that he may be temporarily kept in confinement made as delightful as possible. Such is the brief abstract of this pleasant doctrine that so highly recommends itself to modern criminologists and is most eminently reasonable on the ground of materialistic evolution.

Not merely is “idiocy a reversion, crime a disease, free will a delusion and religion an emotion,” according to the doctrine of our advanced sociologists, but their code of morality and social life is not seldom deduced from the lower animals themselves. If God does not exist and man is but an evolutionary development of the ape, or a near cousin to him, derived from a common primitive stock, it is but natural that he should turn to the simple life of his ancestral race and so regain the unhampered freedom and the unconventional liberty of which Christianity has robbed him by its matrimonial laws and other “immoral” restrictions. Often the great bulk of modern social works is consistently devoted to investigations into the “morality” and social practices of the apes in an African jungle, or other bestial so called ancestry of man in order to remodel our moral _ code.

The promoters of materialistic evolution can evidently not admit any unchanging laws of morality. According to the leading Socialist authorities upon this subject, everything is moral in the present state of society that advances the cause of the social revolution. When this has been accomplished a new morality will arise. Other modern writers are equally consistent in denying the existence of any unalterable principles of morality. ‘‘Morality is a purely human matter,” says the Harvard professor, B. M. Anderson, expressing the general consensus of his class. “It grows out of the needs and interests of men. What is good at one time and place is not necessarily good at another time and place. There are no immutable moral principles valid through the ages.” He must consequently admit that there are “many sets of moral values,” and defines the moral law as simply: “The will of the group.” ‘This he holds to be “‘the reigning type of moral theory today.” ” If the will of a group is Bolshevist, then Bolshevism is its true morality. If free love and murder are the will of a group, then this is the true morality.

While the dogma of materialistic evolution naturally leads men to these conclusions, strict consistency must go still further, as we have shown, and demand the rejection of all claims to morality of whatever kind. The new creed, cunningly invented to displace Christianity, admits of nothing but matter and force. It can acknowledge in man no activities that are not the necessary result of purely physical and chemical forces, as little connected with any concept of morality as are the laws of gravitation. Hence the end of all liberty of action, of all responsibility and of all morality in human conduct. Elaborate explanations, couched in bewildering phraseology, are but dust in our eyes. The people cannot be so easily deluded. Admitting the false dogma of materialistic evolution, there is but one verdict to be passed upon the sensualist and criminal, upon Spartacide and anarchist, and that is: “Not Guilty.”

*'“The Value of Money,” pp. 22, ff.