The ethical aspects of evolution

Preface

A volume entitled " The Romance of Evolution," and containing Mr. Kimball's essays upon the contact of the philosophy of evolution with the religious traditions and sentiments, has recently been published with a brief memorial preface which need not be repeated here. Mr. Kimball believed that evolution was the friend and ally of religion and not its enemy, that while it had overthrown an outgrown theology, it had opened the way for more rational and ethical interpretations of religion. He held that it had removed the foundations of religion from the quicksands of external authority and of supernaturalism to the solid basis of reason and experience.

The present volume contains some of Mr. Kimball's most characteristic lectures upon the relation of the doctrine of evolution to the ethical questions of his generation. Many of them were delivered before the Brooklyn Ethical Society and, in some cases, originally bore slightly different titles. Mr. Kimball believed in democracy and in human brotherhood. He believed in equality of privilege for every one.

PREFACE

He was a friend of peace, of justice, of liberty and of fraternity. He thought deeply and spoke forcibly on all such matters.

Appended to the lectures are six sermons preached in the course of a long and fruitful ministry. The concluding sermons are those in which Mr. Kimball bade farewell to his congregations in Hartford, Conn., and Sharon, Mass.

All who knew Mr. Kimball recognized the wide range of his knowledge, the freshness and independence of his thought, his keen sympathy with all who suffered injustice or wrong, his chiA'^alry in taking u^ the cause of the weak and the unbefriended, his fund of humor, his sincerity and warm-heartedness. These addresses and sermons declare what manner of man he was and set forth his matured convictions upon many timely and important themes.

Contents

I

II III

IV

II

Man has always had a deep interest in animals. When he first woke to consciousness from the sleep of his own brute infancy in the early morning of the world's day, possibly its tertiary hour, he found them already risen before him, a habit of precedence they still keep up, crawling as insects over his face, singing as birds in his ear, sporting as quadrupeds at his side. The oldest works of art found on earth, Preraphaelite by at least two hundred thousand years, as well as in other qualities, are etchings of their forms on plates of reindeer horn exhumed from anteglacial caves ; and the liking for them and for pictures and stories about them, and the aptness for getting acquainted with them which all children exhibit to-day, are but the individual child repeating in himself, according to a well-known law of evolution, the intimacy and wonder for them which he learned originally in his childhood as a race. How close ever since have been his relations

with them, how impressive to him their instincts 52 and intelligence, so like yet unlike his own, how many and varied their contributions to the beauty and glory of his dwelling-place and to the comfort and joy of himself! Beneath all outward differences they have been his fellowcitizens in the great kingdom of nature, his inevitable neighbors and associates, if not his recognized blood-relations, in the great family of life. Delegations of them have toiled with him at the plow, hunted with him in the chase, fed with him at the table, played with him at the fireside, traveled with him in the journey, fought with him on the battle-field. All the deeper experiences of his own existence — birth, growth, pain, pleasure, love's thrill, and death's agony — he has seen repeated in them. Language is filled with expressions for the qualities and activities they have in common — men^ wolfish and foxy ; bulls and bears in Wall Street ; camels, " ships of the desert " ; and ships in their turn " ocean greyhounds." Great nations have used them as the emblems of their power — made them play what a part in history as the Roman eagles, the British lion, and the Russian bear! Poetry has found in them some of its most suggestive themes, soaring with them how loftily in Bryant's Waterfowl, singing with them how sweetly in Shelley's Skylark, running with them how gracefully in Cowper's Hares, swinging with them how enchantingly in Lowell's June bird, " atilt like a blossom among the leaves," and galloping with them how gloriously in Sheridan's steed bearing its rider and victory to Cedar Creek and a flying army thirty miles away ! Who would lose out of fiction Ulysses's faithful dog, or the lesson-teaching asses, apes, and foxes of JEsop's Fables, or Don Quixote's Rozinante, or the Cid's Bavieca, or Scott's Antlered Monarch of the Waste, or Dickens's Boxer and Jip, or Poe's croaking Raven, or, later, Mrs. Sewell's Black Beauty, or even Mary's Little Lamb? With what a wealth of vigor and grace they have lent themselves to painting in the canvas of Landseer and of Rosa Bonheur, and to sculpture in such marbles as the Plunging Horses and the Farnese Bull ! Astronomy has taken them as its helper into the far-oif skies, bidding the north forever know its place with a Great and Little Bear, covenng the earth in its cool autumn nights with an Eagle's starry wings and establishing in the solemn heavens the never-stopping merry-go-round of its zodiacal Ram, Bull, Crab, Lion, Scorpion, Goat, and Fishes. And even in the midst of religion's grand service and majestic thoughts they have occupied how large a place both as the victims offered the gods and as the very gods they were offered to — even in our Christian faith have borne on their backs what mighty doctrines as the Serpent, the Worm, the Dove, the Lion of Judah, and the Lamb of God!

It is out of this great wonder realm of animal life, associated with man in so many ways and of which he himself is so vital a part, that zoology has arisen, seeking tO' arrange its objects, to discover their structure, relations, and laws, and to get at their cause and reason. There is no other branch of science which alike in its materials and in itself is so full of interest, no other which embodies so completely the great world-wide principles of evolution and on the field of which the battles against it have been so fierce and the victories for it so brilliant, no other which lets the student in so close to the very workshop and elbow of nature and so near to the great mystery of life, no other which opens so suggestively into the whole philosophy of man's own being, both physical and mental, individual and social, as this ; and a lecture devoted not so much to its details, needing years of study, as to its growth and larger teachings and to its bearing on these other themes, may have its modest place, even when the lecturer's qualification for it is only a love about equally divided between its outside live objects and its inside live truths.

I. Looked at historically, the growth of the science itself has been along the direct lines not only of evolution, but of evolution in its Darwinian phase of mounting up from species to species through variation, modifying environment, a struggle for existence, and natural selection. In its beginnings and first forms, the same as with life itself, it was vague, nebulous, protoplasmic, consisting for ages of only such acquaintance with the habits and structure of animals as the hunter and the herdsman following them in the chase and the field, and the priest and the householder cutting them up for the altar and the table, would be likely to acquire, and of such accounts of them as wonder and amazement would be likely to suggest. Even after collections of their varieties began to be made it was as objects of curiosity and amusement rather than of study ; and in regard to their very names, if it is not a puzzle as to how they were obtained from their more waspy^, bearish, and uncommunicative owners, as it was to John Phoenix how astronomers ever got at those of the stars, it is one, certainly, as to which animals those used in its earlier books were really meant for, so loose is their description.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), that mountain mind which caught on its brow so many of the beams of wisdom's rising sun a thousand years before they touched the vales below, was the first observer to look on animals with the really scientific eye, describing minutely their wonderful varieties, and, by his divisions of them into oviparous, viviparous, and the like, recognizing the need, if not the method, of their classification. It was a work in which Alexander the Great was his friend and patron, putting at his service, it is said, millions of money and thousands of men, specimens also of all the new animals and plants found by him in the countries he ravaged; and it is an interesting fact that while the empires over men that the great Macedonian established have long since passed away, and the glory that he won as a warrior become only a blot on the page of history, the little he did among the brutes was the founding of a kingdom that has gone on to gather all lands into its sweep and is the sole thing remembered now to his credit.

But Aristotle, like advanced thinkers in all departments of life, even in religion itself, if a great help to progress, was also a great hindrance ; if a mountain to catch long beforehand the beams of the rising sun, a mountain likewise to throw long afterward a deep darkness over the plain. For two thousand years men lingered in the shadow of his great name, studied what he had said about animals rather than animals themselves, and trembled lest in going beyond Aristotle they should go beyond truth. It was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with them the advent of Raj and Willoughby in England, Buffon in France, and preeminently Linnaeus in Sweden, that the science resumed its growth, one of the many instances in known history of a leaping from mind to mind over w^hole centuries with hardly a connecting link between, which ought to remove all difficulty about missing links in the ages before history when in accordance with the same law the leap was from species to species and from form to form.

The great service of Linnseus (1707—1768) to zoology, the same as to botany, was his well-known twofold one of classification and of nomenclature. He was a new Adam in the Eden of science before whom each of its creatures passed again to be named, a scientific Napoleon in the kingdom of nature, who took its myriad inhabitants as a mob and organized them into the divisions, brigades, regiments, and companies of a vast army, each with its own distinctive uniform. And though his organization, while serving well on some fields, has proved inadequate for science's advancing needs, his system of double names — one for genus and the other for species — has been of immense permanent value, and illustrates strikingly the new power that words with fixed meanings have to make charges with, bayonetlike, in the battles of thought.

The work of Linnaeus was taken up and carried on yet further by Cuvier (1769-1832), the third great name in zoology. A new and vastly improved system of classification, based on the structure of its objects as a whole, rather than on a single feature of them, was added by him to its growth. The idea of its kingdom as a regular series, scala naturce, ascending from zoophyte to man, which had hitherto prevailed, he supplanted with the conception of it as a tree-like structure, having four distinct branches — mollusc, radiate, articulate, and vertebrate — an immense gain. He was the first zoologist to enter the great nature-built museum of the rocks and recognize the exceeding value of its fossil treasures as the antecedents of living forms ; and his skill as a comparative anatomist is indicated by the fact that while his predecessors had mistaken the bones of creatures as wide apart as the elephant and the salamander for those of men, he out of a single tooth could reconstruct the whole body of an animal otherwise unknown.

It was under him that zoology reached the maturity of its second great form, that of organized knowledge, natural history ; and who can compare it with what it was to begin with, a mere unassorted collection of strange stories about animals, and not see that it was as much a transmutation of species as any that the primitive amoeBa ever underwent in mounting up from its original protoplasm to be an organized mammal ?

Side by side with this process of classification, however, another one still more striking had already begun — that of asking what was the origin and cause of classes, and of trying to get at the laws and forces by which they had naturally come. As far back as the time of Linnaeus — not to go back to that of Hippocrates and Lucretius — BufFon (170T-1788) had given the question birth. He is usually ridiculed as a dreamer rather than a scientist, a man who in studying animals vivisected them unopened with his imagination as a scalpel, and arranged them unpunctured with his philosophy as a pin; and indeed as a dealer with facts he is not for a moment to be compared with Linnseus and Cuvier. But he got hold in his dreaming of some things in nature that they with their eyes wide open for facts were utterly blind to ; he was a babe in zoology as compared with them, but, like the primitive anthropoid, the babe of a new species. He reached forward in fancy to almost the exact thing that Darwin later found in fact, expressing it, however, as he had to, in the subjunctive mood of church fear rather than with the indicative of scientific manhood. " If," he says, " we did not know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might easily have concluded, so fallible is our reason, that animals always varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated, suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference " — words that for delicate ingenuity in hinting a truth so as not to hurt a prejudice, serving God and yet not offending mammon, even a minister in the pulpit could hardly rival.

The new species of zoology thus feebly begun developed in the time of Cuvier into a great school of brilliant thinkers who in their aims and methods were widely differentiated from the old stock. On the side of the past were the patient observers and careful experimentalists who held to the traditional doctrine of species as the immediate work of the Creator, and believed in letting new theories about causes alone and in confining themselves to the collection and arrangement of facts. On the other side were the bold speculators and nature-philosophers who believed in studying the causes which underlie the facts, and in all species as originating through natural laws out of a primitive stock, a side which embraced such advocates as Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who believed in a slow inward variability as leading to their differences; Lamarck (1744-1829), who ascribed them to the efforts accumulating through inheritance of the animals themselves ;

St.-Hilaire (177^1844), who emphasized the action of the environment; Oken (1779—1851), who taught the doctrine of protoplasm and the cell; and Goethe (1749-1832), who explained the skull with all its wonders as only an enlargement of the upper spinal vertebra. The antagonism between the two schools widened gradually from word and work into feeling and friction ; and at last, in 1830, it broke out on the floor of the French Academy in an open dispute, headed by Cuvier on the one side and St.-Hilaire on the other, which for violence and ferocity the beasts themselves could hardly have excelled, the famous dispute which Goethe at his home in Weimar looked upon as of so much more importance than the French Revolution breaking out at the same time, that he could hardly imagine how his friend, when he spoke to him of " this great event," could think he referred to the mere political outbreak.

Cuvier won the victory for the time in hand, nothing being able to withstand the torrent of facts that his brain, made on the mitrailleuse principle, was able to pour forth; and for thirty years he was the hero, the world over, of conservatism and the church. All the same, however, the new phase of the science kept on with its growth. Von Baer (1792-1876) opened and read the testimony of embryology; John Miller dissected and described, with an accuracy unknown before, the animal body; Richard Owen (1804-1892) pointed out the distinction of analogous and homologous members in comparative anatomy; Schwam (1810- 1882) discovered with his miscroscope the starting-point in the cell of all animal life ; and Herbert Spencer formulated the great principles of biology in his new synthetic philosophy. Then evolution, having done its work with observation and speculation, separated, took its next great step in order — that of integrating them in a man who, with a minuteness and accuracy of observation which place him at the head of all fact-gatherers, united a skill of interpretation and a boldness of generalization which place him at the forefront of all truth-finders — Charles Darwin, the fourth great name in zoology; and the result was the " Origin of Species," and the transmuting of what with others had been a brilliant guess into a statement of the very laws and principles by which as a fact it had been brought about. It was itself another phase of its own doctrine — raised zoology to be a new species of science as distinct from those which had gone before it as ever man was from monkey. In its first form it was natural knowledge, in its second natural history, in its third natural science ; in its first fact, in its second order, in its third truth; in its first an unorganized amoeba, in its second a vertebrated animal, and in its third an intelligent man. It exists in all three of those forms to-day, just as other derived species do; has its museum and picture-book species, its cabinet and school-book species, and its ethical-society and philosophical-lecture species ; and people are interested sometimes in one, sometimes in another, and now and then in all three.

With the proclamation of its new truth there came in natural order its struggle for existence, the world's modern thirty years' war. Against it have been brought to bear all the thunderbolts of theology, all the flippancies and squibs of the newspaper, all the stupidities and timidities of society at large, and alj the arguments the conservative side of science could find in its arsenal. Agassiz's great work on " Classification," the crowning effort of zoology's old dispensation, was published by a striking coincidence the same year that gave to the animal world its newevangel ; and even he had to say " Darwinism is a burlesque of facts," and " science would renounce the claim which it has hitherto possessed to the confidence of earnest minds if such sketches were to be accepted as indications of true progress " — words that evince how distinctly a man may see facts and yet how utterly blind he may be to truths, how accurately know the trees of the forest and yet how ignorant be of the forest itself.

On the other side have stood from the start such names as those of Wallace, Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, themselves masters in the realms of thought. Little by little Cuvier's great victory on the floor of the French Academy, gloried in for thirty years as the triumph of fact over theory, observation over speculation, has been turned to defeat. The facts themselves, whole regiments of them, enlisted so carefully under the banners of observation, some the very ones that Agassiz himself gathered, have mutinied against their own leaders and have put in their sturdiest blows in behalf of theory. Darwin's doctrine, whether or not it is regarded as the whole truth about descent, is held, almost without exception, to be a large piece of it, the grandest generalization yet reached in zoological progress. And Darwin himself stands forth to-day a testimony forever to the value of the speculative reason, as well as of the plodding, practical, fact-gathering senses, as an agency in winning victories even on the fields of material science.

But while recognizing thus the inward growing force of zoology's great names and the struggle for existence it went through, there is another element of evolution working with them in producing its changes, which is not to be forgotten — that of its environment and of the world's general unfolding knowledge. Meateating, and with it the need of cutting creatures up, making in every butcher's shop a dissecting-room ; medicine, and with it the study of man's structure ; vaticination, and with it the inspection of animal bodies, each of these must have contributed largely at the start to its knowledge of facts. The discovery and exploration of America in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, bringing to its hands a multitude of new animals, brought about almost as a necessity the classificatory stage into which it then developed. And geology, revealing a score of other new worlds with their missing links under the old one's feet ; the microscope, revealing still another score in the old one's every drop of water; astronomy, explaining with its nebular hypothesis the origin of a myriad worlds from one primal mist ; chemistry, explaining with its atomic theory the origin of a myriad substances from possibly one primal element ; Lyell, explaining with his uniformatory doctrine the production of all the varieties of rock from one central mass; Harvey, explaining with his circulation of the blood the moving of a thousand little drops from one common fountain of life ; and Herbert Spencer, explaining with his grand synthetic philosophy the evolution of the universe as a whole from one starting-point of matter and force, all sweeping along in the same path of a single natural cause for a series of widely different results — all surrounded zoology with an atmosphere which inevitably helped to sweep its thinkers on to Darwin's like new truth.

Even the changing climate of the religious world was not without its modifying effect. The zoological mind, the same as the thinking mind everywhere, felt the inspiring warmth of the new summer, the delicious trouble in the moral ground, that with the Reformation began coming to the world of men. Ideas that Buff on could only hint in the cellar, Darwin could proclaim unhindered on the house-top. The scepticism of religion became the faith of science. And just in proportion as the Church got rid of its doctrine that man had gone down from his primitive perfection to being " a worm of the dust," it became possible for the lecture-room to show that his being a worm was the very condition from which he had come up.

Nor were humbler agencies lacking as contributors to the grand result. Darwin notoriously was started on the track of his doctrine of how species originate by what he found in the farmyard and the garden. The experience of breeders down through long ages had accumulated a vast fund of practical knowledge on the subject, overlooked by other scientists, that he was not ashamed to sit at their feet and learn. Hodge was found not to have raised his pigs through so many generations only for pork. The story of the crafty Jacob in the sheepfolds of old Laban was discovered to have a truth in it beyond anything the most inveterate believer in biblical infallibility had ever dreamed of. Doves, drawing of old the chariot of Venus, drew for him the fairer one of wisdom. Mares bred to win prizes at the Derby were taught under his touch to win them on the race-course of science. And while other men had sought truth by converse with the gods, and thought of it as too holy a thing to be enshrined in aught but learned tongues, its nineteenth-century disciple found it, like the Magi of old, cradled in a stable and uttering itself in that most despised of all things, " horse talk," illustrating anew Emerson's words:

** 'Tis not in the high stars alone,

Nor in the cups of budding flowers,

Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone.

Nor in the bow that smiles thro' showers.

But in the mud and scum of things

That alway, alway something sings ! **

II. Passing now from what zoology has been historically as an embodiment of evolution to what it is scientifically as a field for it, how widely already has it opened its gate for its entrance ! It is not indeed the whole of its sphere.

The starry heavens, the rock-ribbed earth, the chemical elements, the vast realm of botany, and who shall say how largely the kingdom of mind, are other rooms in its great house. But it is one of its most important departments — one that, with the great mystery of life already its occupant, it seemed beforehand almost impossible for it to enter. All its great fundamental principles — homogeneousness at the start, differentiation, rhythmic movement, the multiplication of effects, integration, and then dissolution and the use of its materials over again in a new series — all these, with some others, as natural selection, peculiar to its own realm, it illustrates with marvelous beauty alike in the individual and the race, evinces it as holding good in the realms of flesh and life as well as in those of matter and force, shows that what made the star made the soul, that what organized the earth organized its inhabitants, and that the highway of creation trod out of primal fire-mist over whirling atom, tenuous nebula and blazing sun, over cooling planet, heaving continent and quaking rock, was not ended or interrupted when it came to man and mind. It is not strange that to the world at large Darwinism means the same thing as evolution. Without the " Origin of Species " to lead the way it is doubtful whether the " First Principles of a New Philosophy " would ever have got beyond the scholar's study. It was its victory on the field of zoology that forced it into the ears and faith of the general public. With the citadel of life carried by its logic and the myriad armies of the animal world made its captives, it was felt that the whole vast fort of the universe might as well be surrendered to it at once as wait for an assault it now became certain nothing could resist.

What a field, too, it affords for its further progress ! Darwin's discovery, with all it did for it, was but a stage along its way, not by any means its goal. It gives us the doctrine of animal descent, starts the student on the right track for all coming investigation; but the actual lines of their descent, the ages and order in which their different classes, families, genera, and species have branched off from the common stock and from each other ; in .short, the construction of that vast genealogical tree, world-wide and ages high, on which each member of the animal family shall have its place marked — that, except it be in Haeckel's imperfect outlines and with a few ancestors of the horse, is as yet hardly touched. Departments for its study that were thought of old to be outside of zoology are brought by the " Origin of Species " directly within its sphere. Ontogeny, the science of the individual, is made by its principles as much a part of it as is phylogeny, the science of the race. Embryology, once regarded as hardly a fly-leaf in its mighty volume, is found under it to be a most precious table of contents, repeating with the child in a few months what it took ages to accomplish with its parents, and giving in its summary whole chapters again, ages long, which in the book itself earthquakes have blotted out and oceans covered up, opening, therefore, what a new world for evolutionary eyes ! Morphology, the science of structure, the study of the origin of the organs inside of the body - — as much species as the animals which are outside of it — what made them vary from their original homogeneous protoplasm into all the complexities of their present condition, three hundred thousand fibers, for instance, in a single optic nerve, and why is it that each animal and each species has the exact size and shape and number of limbs and of senses that it does — all as much a matter of law as the shape of crystals or the orbit of planets — all this is legitimately within its zoological sphere. Then, with man as an animal, sociology, the study of the laws and forces which evolve society, is surely as much a part of it as is the study of those which gather the bee in hives and the ant in hills ; and especially comparative sociology, an investigation of the common elements which run through all collections of animals froni those oj^ the insect up.

how much has it got here to learn — what a help, also, we find from it in solving some of the? social problems that we are vainly now seeking wisdom for among ourselves, giving a new point to old Solomon's words, " Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise." And, crowning all, psychology, the marvels of mind and soul, the wonder that fills and overflows this wonder of body — consciousness, love, thought, aspiration — how they unfolded out of protoplasm with the body, what they root in and what they lead to, all these have got to be studied henceforth in connection with animals — are for some future Darwin to make discoveries in as much beyond the " Origin of Species " as the " Origin of Species " is beyond the animal pictures that the old troglodytes drew on their half-eaten bones in the caves of Dordogne and La Madelaine.