CHAPTER VI.

THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY.

OUR outline-sketch of the Cosmic Philosophy based on the Doctrine of Evolution would remain seriously defective without some account of its critical bearing with reference to past and present religious beliefs and social institutions. Since the reception of a number of definite opinions concerning man in his relations to the universe and to his fellow-creatures must leave their possessor in a certain characteristic attitude,-aggressive or sympathetic, iconoclastic or conservative,-toward the multitude of opposite or conflicting opinions by which he is surrounded, it becomes desirable for us to ascertain whether the critical temper of our Cosmic Philosophy tends toward the subversion or the conservation of that complex aggregate of beliefs and ordinances which make up the social order amid which we live. Our object will be best attained, and our results will be most clearly presented, if we begin by considering some of the philosophic contrasts between the statical and dynamical habits of thinking, to which attention was called in an earlier chapter.

A statical view of things, as I have above defined it, is one which is adjusted solely or chiefly to relations existing in the immediate environment of the thinker. Certain groups

of physical phenomena, certain psychical prejudices, certain social customs, having existed with tolerable uniformity over a limited portion of the earth's surface, it is assumed either that the given phenomena have always existed, or at least that they enter by divine pre-arrangement into the eternal order of things in such a way that any thorough-going alteration of them must involve universal anarchy and ruin. The fundamental doctrine of the philosophy which is determined by this statical habit of interpreting phenomena, is the Doctrine of Creation. The world is supposed to have been suddenly brought into existence at some assignable epoch, since which time it has remained substantially unaltered. Existing races of sentient creatures are held to have been created by a miraculous fiat in accordance with sundry organic types which, as representing unchangeable ideas in the Divine Mind, can never be altered by physical circumstances. The social institutions also, amid which the particular statical theory originates, are either referred back to the foundation of the world, as is the case in early and barbaric mythologies; or else, as is the case with modern uneducated Christians, they are supposed to have been introduced by miracle at a definite era of history. In similar wise the existing order of things is legitimately to endure until abruptly terminated by the direct intervention of an extra-cosmic Power endowed with the anthropomorphic attributes of cherishing intentions and of acting out its good pleasure. Facts of palæontology, such as the extinction of myriads of ancient animal and vegetal species, are explained as the result of innumerable catastrophes determined by this same extra-cosmic Deity; and strange geologic phenomena are interpreted by the myth of a universal deluge which left them once for all just as we see them. Likewise the social institutions and the religious beliefs now existing by express divine sanction, must remain essentially unaltered under penalty of divine wrath as manifested

in the infliction upon society of the evils of atheism and anarchy. Hence, as the Doctrine of Creation is itself held to be one of these divinely-sanctioned religious beliefs, the scientific tendency to supersede this doctrine by the conception of God as manifested not in spasmodic acts of miracle, but in the gradual and orderly evolution of things, is stigmatized as an atheistical tendency, and the upholders of the new view are naturally enough accredited with a desire to subvert the foundations of religion and of good conduct. Hence it is that even such scientific writers as Mr. Mivart-unable to escape the evidence in favour of Evolution which is supplied by their own studies, yet somewhat desperately clinging to the philosophic views which are founded upon the Doctrine of Creation—are now and then guilty of remarks much better befitting ignorant priests than men who have lived in direct contact with modern scientific thought. That dominance of the statical habit of thinking, which leads Mr. Mivart to prefer the irregular action of "sudden jumps" to the slow but regular operation of natural selection, leads him also to assert that the Doctrine of Evolution, as consistently held by Prof. Huxley, tends toward the intellectual and moral degradation of mankind and toward the genesis of "horrors worse than those of the Parisian Commune! "1

Before proceeding to show how assertions of this sort are, from the evolutionist's point of view, as reckless and absurd as, from Mr. Mivart's point of view, they are justifiable and logical, let us note that the statical habit of thinking is by no means monopolized by the orthodox, or by those whose philosophic theories consist mainly of elements inherited from primeval mythology. The progress of scientific discovery since the time of Galileo and Bacon has but gradually, and as its newest result, established the Doctrine of Evolution; yet it has, from the very outset, assumed a hostile 1 Contemporary Review, January 1872, p. 196.

attitude toward the body of mythical conceptions of which the current Christian theologies have been largely made up. The consequence of this has been the rise of a purely negative iconoclastic style of criticism, both in religion and in politics, which, in spite of its deadly hostility to the prevailing orthodoxy, has nevertheless been equally characterized by theories and aims which are the products of the old statical habits of thought. While orthodoxy and its companion legitimism have regarded the existing religious and social order, not as a product of evolution, but as a divinelyappointed and therefore eternally sacred order of things; on the other hand iconoclasm, whether manifested in religion or in politics, has regarded the existing order of things, not as a product of evolution, but as the work of artful priests and legislators of antiquity, which may accordingly be destroyed as summarily as it was created. Even while justly inveighing, therefore, against patent absurdities or flagrant wrongs in the established order of things, the iconoclast proceeds from a point of view as untenable as that occupied by his orthodox antagonist. Rejecting the mythical conception of the established order as in any especial sense divinely-appointed, he nevertheless borrows from the old mythology its notion of cataclysms, and vainly imagines that beliefs and institutions which suit the intellectual and moral needs of half the world can be incontinently eradicated or overthrown by direct assaults from without. Reasoning, then, upon this inadequate basis, and being as incapable of appreciating sympathetically the beliefs of a bygone age as his orthodox opponent is incapable of emancipating himself from such beliefs, the controversy between the two becomes naturally barren of profit though fruitful in recrimination; and each regards the other with a dislike or a distrust which, though justifiable enough when considered from the points of view respectively occupied by the antagonists, nevertheless

seems barbaric or childish to those who have reached a higher stand-point.

This higher stand-point is furnished by what I have called the dynamical habit of looking at things as continually changing in a definite and irreversible order of sequence. That this habit should not have been acquired, save by two or three isolated minds, until the present century, is not to be wondered at, since for the full acquirement of it there is needed a familiarity with scientific conceptions of genesis which could not have been gained at any earlier date. But as soon as the tendency to contemplate all phenomena as the products of preceding phenomena has become fairly established, a marked change is noticeable in the current style of criticism. The comparative method is found to be as applicable to religious beliefs and social or political institutions as it is to placental mammals or to pluperfect tenses. And so the habit of regarding the existing order of things as on the one hand ordained of God or on the other hand maliciously contrived by the Devil gradually fades away, and is replaced by the habit of regarding it as evolved from some preceding order of things, and as in turn destined normally to evolve some future order. Hence the evolutionist perceives that it is not by mere controversial argument that mankind can be led to exchange the mythological for the scientific point of view. He regards the process as one, not of sudden conversion, but of slow growth, which can be accomplished only by the gradual acquirement of new habits of thought, habits that are formed day by day and year by year, in the course of a long contact, whether immediate or not, with the results of scientific inquiry. Thus the evolutionist owns no fellowship with Jacobins and Infidels, for he has learned that engrained habits of thought and favourite theories of the world, being the products of circumstances, must be to a certain extent adapted to the circumstances amid which they exist; and he knows that they cannot be