Darwinism (1889) by Alfred Russel Wallace

A >> Alfred Russel Wallace >> Darwinism (1889)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43

Let us take, then, the least difficult supposition--that savages
possessed only the mere rudiments of the faculty, such as their ability
to count, sometimes up to ten, but with an utter inability to perform
the very simplest processes of arithmetic or of geometry--and inquire
how this rudimentary faculty became rapidly developed into that of a
Newton, a La Place, a Gauss, or a Cayley. We will admit that there is
every possible gradation between these extremes, and that there has been
perfect continuity in the development of the faculty; but we ask, What
motive power caused its development?

It must be remembered we are here dealing solely with the capability of
the Darwinian theory to account for the origin of the _mind_, as well as
it accounts for the origin of the _body_ of man, and we must, therefore,
recall the essential features of that theory. These are, the
preservation of useful variations in the struggle for life; that no
creature can be improved beyond its necessities for the time being; that
the law acts by life and death, and by the survival of the fittest. We
have to ask, therefore, what relation the successive stages of
improvement of the mathematical faculty had to the life or death of its
possessors; to the struggles of tribe with tribe, or nation with nation;
or to the ultimate survival of one race and the extinction of another.
If it cannot possibly have had any such effects, then it cannot have
been produced by natural selection.

It is evident that in the struggles of savage man with the elements and
with wild beasts, or of tribe with tribe, this faculty can have had no
influence. It had nothing to do with the early migrations of man, or
with the conquest and extermination of weaker by more powerful peoples.
The Greeks did not successfully resist the Persian invaders by any aid
from their few mathematicians, but by military training, patriotism, and
self-sacrifice. The barbarous conquerors of the East, Timurlane and
Gengkhis Khan, did not owe their success to any superiority of intellect
or of mathematical faculty in themselves or their followers. Even if the
great conquests of the Romans were, in part, due to their systematic
military organisation, and to their skill in making roads and
encampments, which may, perhaps, be imputed to some exercise of the
mathematical faculty, that did not prevent them from being conquered in
turn by barbarians, in whom it was almost entirely absent. And if we
take the most civilised peoples of the ancient world--the Hindoos, the
Arabs, the Greeks, and the Romans, all of whom had some amount of
mathematical talent--we find that it is not these, but the descendants
of the barbarians of those days--the Celts, the Teutons, and the
Slavs--who have proved themselves the fittest to survive in the great
struggle of races, although we cannot trace their steadily growing
success during past centuries either to the possession of any
exceptional mathematical faculty or to its exercise. They have indeed
proved themselves, to-day, to be possessed of a marvellous endowment of
the mathematical faculty; but their success at home and abroad, as
colonists or as conquerors, as individuals or as nations, can in no way
be traced to this faculty, since they were almost the last who devoted
themselves to its exercise. We conclude, then, that the present gigantic
development of the mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the
theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct
cause.

_The Origin of the Musical and Artistic Faculties._

These distinctively human faculties follow very closely the lines of the
mathematical faculty in their progressive development, and serve to
enforce the same argument. Among the lower savages music, as we
understand it, hardly exists, though they all delight in rude musical
sounds, as of drums, tom-toms, or gongs; and they also sing in
monotonous chants. Almost exactly as they advance in general intellect,
and in the arts of social life, their appreciation of music appears to
rise in proportion; and we find among them rude stringed instruments and
whistles, till, in Java, we have regular bands of skilled performers
probably the successors of Hindoo musicians of the age before the
Mahometan conquest. The Egyptians are believed to have been the earliest
musicians, and from them the Jews and the Greeks, no doubt, derived
their knowledge of the art; but it seems to be admitted that neither the
latter nor the Romans knew anything of harmony or of the essential
features of modern music.[233] Till the fifteenth century little
progress appears to have been made in the science or the practice of
music; but since that era it has advanced with marvellous rapidity, its
progress being curiously parallel with that of mathematics, inasmuch as
great musical geniuses appeared suddenly among different nations, equal
in their possession of this special faculty to any that have since
arisen.

As with the mathematical, so with the musical faculty, it is impossible
to trace any connection between its possession and survival in the
struggle for existence. It seems to have arisen as a _result_ of social
and intellectual advancement, not as a _cause_; and there is some
evidence that it is latent in the lower races, since under European
training native military bands have been formed in many parts of the
world, which have been able to perform creditably the best modern music.

The artistic faculty has run a somewhat different course, though
analogous to that of the faculties already discussed. Most savages
exhibit some rudiments of it, either in drawing or carving human or
animal figures; but, almost without exception, these figures are rude
and such as would be executed by the ordinary inartistic child. In fact,
modern savages are, in this respect hardly equal to those prehistoric
men who represented the mammoth and the reindeer on pieces of horn or
bone. With any advance in the arts of social life, we have a
corresponding advance in artistic skill and taste, rising very high in
the art of Japan and India, but culminating in the marvellous sculpture
of the best period of Grecian history. In the Middle Ages art was
chiefly manifested in ecclesiastical architecture and the illumination
of manuscripts, but from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries
pictorial art revived in Italy and attained to a degree of perfection
which has never been surpassed. This revival was followed closely by the
schools of Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and England, showing
that the true artistic faculty belonged to no one nation, but was fairly
distributed among the various European races.

These several developments of the artistic faculty, whether manifested
in sculpture, painting, or architecture, are evidently outgrowths of the
human intellect which have no immediate influence on the survival of
individuals or of tribes, or on the success of nations in their
struggles for supremacy or for existence. The glorious art of Greece did
not prevent the nation from falling under the sway of the less advanced
Roman; while we ourselves, among whom art was the latest to arise, have
taken the lead in the colonisation of the world, thus proving our mixed
race to be the fittest to survive.

_Independent Proof that the Mathematical, Musical, and Artistic
Faculties have not been Developed under the Law of Natural Selection._

The law of Natural Selection or the survival of the fittest is, as its
name implies, a rigid law, which acts by the life or death of the
individuals submitted to its action. From its very nature it can act
only on useful or hurtful characteristics, eliminating the latter and
keeping up the former to a fairly general level of efficiency. Hence it
necessarily follows that the characters developed by its means will be
present in all the individuals of a species, and, though varying, will
not vary very widely from a common standard. The amount of variation we
found, in our third chapter, to be about one-fifth or one-sixth of the
mean value--that is, if the mean value were taken at 100, the variations
would reach from 80 to 120, or somewhat more, if very large numbers were
compared. In accordance with this law we find, that all those characters
in man which were certainly essential to him during his early stages of
development, exist in all savages with some approach to equality. In the
speed of running, in bodily strength, in skill with weapons, in
acuteness of vision, or in power of following a trail, all are fairly
proficient, and the differences of endowment do not probably exceed the
limits of variation in animals above referred to. So, in animal instinct
or intelligence, we find the same general level of development. Every
wren makes a fairly good nest like its fellows; every fox has an average
amount of the sagacity of its race; while all the higher birds and
mammals have the necessary affections and instincts needful for the
protection and bringing-up of their offspring.

But in those specially developed faculties of civilised man which we
have been considering, the case is very different. They exist only in a
small proportion of individuals, while the difference of capacity
between these favoured individuals and the average of mankind is
enormous. Taking first the mathematical faculty, probably fewer than one
in a hundred really possess it, the great bulk of the population having
no natural ability for the study, or feeling the slightest interest in
it.[234] And if we attempt to measure the amount of variation in the
faculty itself between a first-class mathematician and the ordinary run
of people who find any kind of calculation confusing and altogether
devoid of interest, it is probable that the former could not be
estimated at less than a hundred times the latter, and perhaps a
thousand times would more nearly measure the difference between them.

The artistic faculty appears to agree pretty closely with the
mathematical in its frequency. The boys and girls who, going beyond the
mere conventional designs of children, draw what they _see_, not what
they _know_ to be the shape of things; who naturally sketch in
perspective, because it is thus they see objects; who see, and represent
in their sketches, the light and shade as well as the mere outlines of
objects; and who can draw recognisable sketches of every one they know,
are certainly very few compared with those who are totally incapable of
anything of the kind. From some inquiries I have made in schools, and
from my own observation, I believe that those who are endowed with this
natural artistic talent do not exceed, even if they come up to, one per
cent of the whole population.

The variations in the amount of artistic faculty are certainly very
great, even if we do not take the extremes. The gradations of power
between the ordinary man or woman "who does not draw," and whose
attempts at representing any object, animate or inanimate, would be
laughable, and the average good artist who, with a few bold strokes, can
produce a recognisable and even effective sketch of a landscape, a
street, or an animal, are very numerous; and we can hardly measure the
difference between them at less than fifty or a hundred fold.

The musical faculty is undoubtedly, in its lower forms, less uncommon
than either of the preceding, but it still differs essentially from the
necessary or useful faculties in that it is almost entirely wanting in
one-half even of civilised men. For every person who draws, as it were
instinctively, there are probably five or ten who sing or play without
having been taught and from mere innate love and perception of melody
and harmony.[235] On the other hand, there are probably about as many
who seem absolutely deficient in musical perception, who take little
pleasure in it, who cannot perceive discords or remember tunes, and who
could not learn to sing or play with any amount of study. The
gradations, too, are here quite as great as in mathematics or pictorial
art, and the special faculty of the great musical composer must be
reckoned many hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than that
of the ordinary "unmusical" person above referred to.

It appears then, that, both on account of the limited number of persons
gifted with the mathematical, the artistic, or the musical faculty, as
well as from the enormous variations in its development, these mental
powers differ widely from those which are essential to man, and are, for
the most part, common to him and the lower animals; and that they could
not, therefore, possibly have been developed in him by means of the law
of natural selection.

* * * * *

We have thus shown, by two distinct lines of argument, that faculties
are developed in civilised man which, both in their mode of origin,
their function, and their variations, are altogether distinct from those
other characters and faculties which are essential to him, and which
have been brought to their actual state of efficiency by the necessities
of his existence. And besides the three which have been specially
referred to, there are others which evidently belong to the same class.
Such is the metaphysical faculty, which enables us to form abstract
conceptions of a kind the most remote from all practical applications,
to discuss the ultimate causes of things, the nature and qualities of
matter, motion, and force, of space and time, of cause and effect, of
will and conscience. Speculations on these abstract and difficult
questions are impossible to savages, who seem to have no mental faculty
enabling them to grasp the essential ideas or conceptions; yet whenever
any race attains to civilisation, and comprises a body of people who,
whether as priests or philosophers, are relieved from the necessity of
labour or of taking an active part in war or government, the
metaphysical faculty appears to spring suddenly into existence,
although, like the other faculties we have referred to, it is always
confined to a very limited proportion of the population.

In the same class we may place the peculiar faculty of wit and humour,
an altogether natural gift whose development appears to be parallel with
that of the other exceptional faculties. Like them, it is almost unknown
among savages, but appears more or less frequently as civilisation
advances and the interests of life become more numerous and more
complex. Like them, too, it is altogether removed from utility in the
struggle for life, and appears sporadically in a very small percentage
of the population; the majority being, as is well known, totally unable
to say a witty thing or make a pun even to save their lives.[236]

_The Interpretation of the Facts._

The facts now set forth prove the existence of a number of mental
faculties which either do not exist at all or exist in a very
rudimentary condition in savages, but appear almost suddenly and in
perfect development in the higher civilised races. These same faculties
are further distinguished by their sporadic character, being well
developed only in a very small proportion of the community; and by the
enormous amount of variation in their development, the higher
manifestations of them being many times--perhaps a hundred or a thousand
times--stronger than the lower. Each of these characteristics is totally
inconsistent with any action of the law of natural selection in the
production of the faculties referred to; and the facts, taken in their
entirety, compel us to recognise some origin for them wholly distinct
from that which has served to account for the animal
characteristics--whether bodily or mental--of man.

The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the
existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal
progenitors--something which we may best refer to as being of a
spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under
favourable conditions. On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature,
superadded to the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much
that is otherwise mysterious or unintelligible in regard to him,
especially the enormous influence of ideas, principles, and beliefs over
his whole life and actions. Thus alone we can understand the constancy
of the martyr, the unselfishness of the philanthropist, the devotion of
the patriot, the enthusiasm of the artist, and the resolute and
persevering search of the scientific worker after nature's secrets. Thus
we may perceive that the love of truth, the delight in beauty, the
passion for justice, and the thrill of exultation with which we hear of
any act of courageous self-sacrifice, are the workings within us of a
higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for
material existence.

It will, no doubt, be urged that the admitted continuity of man's
progress from the brute does not admit of the introduction of new
causes, and that we have no evidence of the sudden change of nature
which such introduction would bring about. The fallacy as to new causes
involving any breach of continuity, or any sudden or abrupt change, in
the effects, has already been shown; but we will further point out that
there are at least three stages in the development of the organic world
when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action.

The first stage is the change from inorganic to organic, when the
earliest vegetable cell, or the living protoplasm out of which it arose,
first appeared. This is often imputed to a mere increase of complexity
of chemical compounds; but increase of complexity, with consequent
instability, even if we admit that it may have produced protoplasm as a
chemical compound, could certainly not have produced _living_
protoplasm--protoplasm which has the power of growth and of
reproduction, and of that continuous process of development which has
resulted in the marvellous variety and complex organisation of the whole
vegetable kingdom. There is in all this something quite beyond and
apart from chemical changes, however complex; and it has been well said
that the first vegetable cell was a new thing in the world, possessing
altogether new powers--that of extracting and fixing carbon from the
carbon-dioxide of the atmosphere, that of indefinite reproduction, and,
still more marvellous, the power of variation and of reproducing those
variations till endless complications of structure and varieties of form
have been the result. Here, then, we have indications of a new power at
work, which we may term _vitality_, since it gives to certain forms of
matter all those characters and properties which constitute Life.

The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond
all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces. It is the
introduction of sensation or consciousness, constituting the fundamental
distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Here all idea of
mere complication of structure producing the result is out of the
question. We feel it to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a
certain stage of complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary
result of that complexity alone, an _ego_ should start into existence, a
thing that _feels_, that is _conscious_ of its own existence. Here we
have the certainty that something new has arisen, a being whose nascent
consciousness has gone on increasing in power and definiteness till it
has culminated in the higher animals. No verbal explanation or attempt
at explanation--such as the statement that life is the result of the
molecular forces of the protoplasm, or that the whole existing organic
universe from the amaeba up to man was latent in the fire-mist from
which the solar system was developed--can afford any mental
satisfaction, or help us in any way to a solution of the mystery.

The third stage is, as we have seen, the existence in man of a number of
his most characteristic and noblest faculties, those which raise him
furthest above the brutes and open up possibilities of almost indefinite
advancement. These faculties could not possibly have been developed by
means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development
of the organic world in general, and also of man's physical
organism.[237]

These three distinct stages of progress from the inorganic world of
matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an unseen universe--to a
world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate.
To this spiritual world we may refer the marvellously complex forces
which we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force,
and electricity, without which the material universe could not exist for
a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, since without
these forces, and perhaps others which may be termed atomic, it is
doubtful whether matter itself could have any existence. And still more
surely can we refer to it those progressive manifestations of Life in
the vegetable, the animal, and man--which we may classify as
unconscious, conscious, and intellectual life,--and which probably
depend upon different degrees of spiritual influx. I have already shown
that this involves no necessary infraction of the law of continuity in
physical or mental evolution; whence it follows that any difficulty we
may find in discriminating the inorganic from the organic, the lower
vegetable from the lower animal organisms, or the higher animals from
the lowest types of man, has no bearing at all upon the question. This
is to be decided by showing that a change in essential nature (due,
probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the material
universe) took place at the several stages of progress which I have
indicated; a change which may be none the less real because absolutely
imperceptible at its point of origin, as is the change that takes place
in the curve in which a body is moving when the application of some new
force causes the curve to be slightly altered.

_Concluding Remarks._

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced--strictly
scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought
_not_ to be on the materialistic theory--will be able to accept the
spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory
of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes
which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will
also be relieved from the crushing mental burthen imposed upon those
who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but
products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also
that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on
the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant
future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of
years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate
at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed; who are compelled
to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a
higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all
the evil and misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the
struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the
aspirations for virtue and the wellbeing of humanity, shall absolutely
vanish, and, "like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack
behind."

As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who
accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as
a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of
spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. To us,
the whole purpose, the only _raison d'etre_ of the world--with all its
complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress,
the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the
ultimate appearance of man--was the development of the human spirit in
association with the human body. From the fact that the spirit of
man--the man himself--_is_ so developed, we may well believe that this
is the only, or at least the best, way for its development; and we may
even see in what is usually termed "evil" on the earth, one of the most
efficient means of its growth. For we know that the noblest faculties of
man are strengthened and perfected by struggle and effort; it is by
unceasing warfare against physical evils and in the midst of difficulty
and danger that energy, courage, self-reliance, and industry have become
the common qualities of the northern races; it is by the battle with
moral evil in all its hydra-headed forms, that the still nobler
qualities of justice and mercy and humanity and self-sacrifice have been
steadily increasing in the world. Beings thus trained and strengthened
by their surroundings, and possessing latent faculties capable of such
noble development, are surely destined for a higher and more permanent
existence; and we may confidently believe with our greatest living
poet--