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The Whence and the Whither of Man by John Mason Tyler

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THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN

A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity
to Environment

Being the Morse Lectures of 1895

by

JOHN M. TYLER
Professor of Biology, Amherst College

New York
Charles Scribner's Sons

1896







Morse Lectures

1893--THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN
MODERN THEOLOGY. By Rev. A.M.
Fairbairn, D.D. 8vo, $2.50

1894--THE RELIGIONS OF JAPAN. By Rev.
William Elliot Griffis, D.D.
12mo, $2.00.

1895--THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF
MAN. By Professor John M. Tyler.
12mo, $1.75.





TABLE OF CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION


CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION

The question.--The two theories of man's origin.--The argument
purely historical.--Means of tracing man's ancestry and
history.--Classification.--Ontogenesis and Phylogenesis.


CHAPTER II

PROTOZOA TO WORMS: CELLS, TISSUES, AND ORGANS

Amoeba: Its anatomy and physiology.--Development of the
cell.--Hydra: The development of digestive and reproductive organs,
and of tissues.--Forms intermediate between amoeba and hydra:
Magosphaera, volvox.--Embryonic development.--Turbellaria: Appearance
of a body wall, of ganglion, and nerve-cords.


CHAPTER III

WORMS TO VERTEBRATES: SKELETON AND HEAD

Worms and the development of organs.--Mollusks: The external
protective skeleton leads to degeneration or stagnation.--Annelids
and arthropods: The external locomotive skeleton leads
to temporary rapid advance, but fails of the goal.--Its
disadvantages.--Vertebrates: The internal locomotive skeleton leads
to backbone and brain.--Reasons for their dominance.--The primitive
vertebrate.


CHAPTER IV

VERTEBRATES: BACKBONE AND BRAIN

The advance of vertebrates from fish through amphibia and reptiles
to mammals.--The development of skeleton, appendages, circulatory
and respiratory systems, and brain.--Mammals: The oviparous
monotremata.--Marsupials.--Placental mammals.--Development of the
placenta.--Primates.--Arboreal life and the development of the
hand.--Comparison of man with the highest apes.--Recapitulation of
the history of man's origin and development.--The sequence of
dominant functions.


CHAPTER V

THE HISTORY OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT AND ITS SEQUENCE OF FUNCTIONS

Mode of investigation.--Intellect.--Sense-perceptions.--Association.
--Inference and understanding.--Rational intelligence.--Modes of mental
or nervous action.--Reflex action, unconscious and comparatively
mechanical.--Instinctive action: The actor is conscious, but guided
by heredity.--Intelligent action.--The actor is conscious, guided by
intelligence resulting from experience or observation.--The will
stimulated by motives.--Appetites.--Fear and other prudential
considerations.--Care for young and love of mates.--The dawn of
unselfishness.--Motives furnished by the rational intelligence:
Truth, right, duty.--Recapitulation: The will, stimulated by ever
higher motives, is finally to be dominated by unselfishness and love
of truth and righteousness.--These rouse the only inappeasable
hunger, and are capable of indefinite development.--Strength of
these motives.--Their complete dominance the goal of human
development.


CHAPTER VI

NATURAL SELECTION AND ENVIRONMENT

The reversal of the sequence of functions leads to extermination,
degeneration, or, rarely, to stagnation.--Natural selection becomes
more unsparing as we go higher.--Extinction.--Severity of the
struggle for life.--Environment one.--But lower animals come into
vital relation with but a small part of it.--It consists of a myriad
of forces, which, as acting on a given form, may be considered as
one grand resultant.--Environment is thus a power making at first
for digestion and reproduction, then for muscular strength and
activity, then for shrewdness, finally for unselfishness and
righteousness.--An ultimate "power, not ourselves, making for
righteousness," a personality.--Our knowledge of this personality
may be valid, even though very incomplete.--Religion.--Conformity to
the spiritual in or behind environment is likeness to God.--The
conservative tendency in evolution.


CHAPTER VII

CONFORMITY TO ENVIRONMENT

Human environment.--The development of the family as the school of
man's training.--The family as the school of unselfishness and
obedience.--The family as the basis of social life.--Society as an
aid to conformity to environment by increasing intelligence and
training conscience.--Mental and moral heredity.--Personal
magnetism.--Man's search for a king.--The essence of
Christianity.--Conformity to environment gives future supremacy, but
often at the cost of present hardship.--Conformity as obedience to
the laws of our being.--Environment best understood through the
study of the human mind.--Productiveness and prospectiveness of
vital capital.--Faith.


CHAPTER VIII

MAN

Composed of atoms and molecules, hence subject to chemical and
physical laws.--As a living being.--As an animal.--As a
vertebrate.--As a mammal.--As a social being.--As a personal and
moral being.--The conflict between the higher and the lower in
man.--As a religious being.--As hero.--He has not yet
attained.--Future man.--He will utilize all his powers, duly
subordinating the lower to the higher.--The triumph of the common
people.


CHAPTER IX

THE TEACHINGS OF THE BIBLE

Subject of the Bible.--_Man_: Body, intellect, heart.--_God_:
Law, sin, and penalty.--God manifested in Christ.--Salvation, the divine
life permeating man--Faith.--Prayer.--Hope.--The Church.--The
battle.--The victory.--The crown.


CHAPTER X

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

The struggle for existence.--Natural selection.--Correlation of
organs.--Fortuitous variation.--Origin of the fittest.--Naegeli's
theory: Initial tendency supreme.--Weismann and the Neo-Darwinians:
Natural selection omnipotent.--The Neo-Lamarckians.--Comparison of
the Neo-Darwinian and the Neo-Lamarckian views.--"Individuality" the
controlling power throughout the life of the organism.--Transmission
of special effects of use and disuse.--Summary.


CHART SHOWING SEQUENCE OF ATTAINMENTS AND OF DOMINANT FUNCTIONS


PHYLOGENETIC CHART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM


INDEX





INTRODUCTION


In the year 1865 Professor Samuel Finley Breese Morse, to whom the
world is indebted for the application of the principles of
electro-magnetism to telegraphy, gave the sum of ten thousand
dollars to Union Theological Seminary to found a lectureship in
memory of his father, the Rev. Jedediah Morse, D.D., theologian,
geographer, and gazetteer. The subject of the lectures was to have
to do with "The relations of the Bible to any of the sciences." The
ten chapters of this book correspond to ten lectures, eight of which
were delivered as Morse Lectures at Union Theological Seminary
during the early spring of 1895. The first nine chapters appear in
form and substance as they were given in the lectures, except that
Chapters VI. and VII. were condensed in one lecture. Chapter X. is
new, and I have not hesitated to add a few paragraphs wherever the
argument seemed especially to demand further evidence or
illustration.

One of my friends, reading the title of these lectures, said: "Of
man's origin you know nothing, of his future you know less." I fear
that many share his opinion, although they might not express it so
emphatically.

It would seem, therefore, to be in order to show that science is now
competent to deal with this question; not that she can give a final
and conclusive answer, but that we can reach results which are
probably in the main correct. We may grant very cheerfully that we
can attain no demonstration; the most that we can claim for our
results will be a high degree of probability. If our conclusions are
very probably correct, we shall do well to act according to them;
for all our actions in life are suited to meet the emergencies of a
probable but uncertain course of events.

We take for granted the probable truth of the theory of evolution as
stated by Mr. Darwin, and that it applies to man as really as to any
lower animal. At the same time it concerns our argument but little
whether natural selection is "omnipotent" or of only secondary
importance in evolution, as long as it is a real factor, or which
theory of heredity or variation is the more probable.

If man has been evolved from simple living substance protoplasm, by
a process of evolution, it will some day be possible to write a
history of that process. But have we yet sufficient knowledge to
justify such an attempt?

Before the history of any period can be written its events must have
been accurately chronicled. Biological history can be written only
when the successive stages of development and the attainments of
each stage have been clearly perceived. In other words, the first
prerequisite would seem to be a genealogical[A] tree of the animal
kingdom. The means of tracing this genealogical tree are given in
the first chapter, and the results in the second, third, and fourth
chapters of this book.

[Footnote A: See Phylogenetic Chart, p. 310.]

Now, for some of the ancestral stages of man's development a very
high degree of probability can be claimed. One of man's earliest
ancestors was almost certainly a unicellular animal. A little later
he very probably passed through a gastraea stage. He traversed fish,
amphibian, and reptilian grades. The oviparous monotreme and the
marsupial almost certainly represent lower mammalian ancestral
stages. But what kind of fish, what species of amphibian, what form
of reptiles most closely resembles the old ancestor? How did each of
these ancestors look? I do not know. It looks as if our ancestral
tree were entirely uncertain and we were left without any foundation
for history or argument.

But the history of the development of anatomical details, however
important and desirable, is not the only history which can be
written, nor is it essential. It would be interesting to know the
size of brain, girth of chest, average stature, and the features of
the ancient Greeks and Romans. But this is not the most important
part of their history, nor is it essential. The great question is,
What did they contribute to human progress?

Even if we cannot accurately portray the anatomical details of a
single ancestral stage, can we perhaps discover what function
governed its life and was the aim of its existence? Did it live to
eat, or to move, or to think? If we cannot tell exactly how it
looked, can we tell what it lived for and what it contributed to the
evolution of man?

Now, the sequence of dominant functions or aims in life can be
traced with far more ease and safety, not to say certainty, than one
of anatomical details. The latter characterize small groups, genera,
families, or classes; while the dominant function characterizes all
animals of a given grade, even those which through degeneration
have reverted to this grade.

Even if I cannot trace the exact path which leads to the
mountain-top, I may almost with certainty affirm that it leads from
meadow and pasture through forest to bare rock, and thence over snow
and ice to the summit; for each of these forms a zone encircling the
mountain. Very similarly I find that, whatever genealogical tree I
adopt, one sequence in the dominance of functions characterizes them
all; digestion is dominant before locomotion and locomotion before
thought.

And it is hardly less than a physiological necessity that it should
be so. The plant can and does exist, living almost purely for
digestion and reproduction, and the same is true of the lowest and
most primitive animals. A muscular system cannot develop and do its
work until some sort of a digestive system has arisen to furnish
nutriment, any more than a steam-engine can run without fuel. And a
brain is of no use until muscle and sense-organs have appeared.

This sequence of dominant functions,[A] of physiological dynasties,
would seem therefore to be a fact. And our series of forms described
in the second, third, and fourth chapters is merely a concrete
illustration showing how this sequence may have been evolved. The
substitution of other terms in the anatomical series there
described--amoeba, volvox, etc.--would not affect this result. By
a change in the form of our history we have eliminated to a large
extent the sources of uncertainty and error. And the dominant
function of a group throws no little light on the details of its
anatomy.

[Footnote A: See condensed Chart of Development, etc., p. 309.]

If we can be satisfied that ever higher functions have risen to
dominance in the successive stages of animal and human development,
if we can further be convinced that the sequence is irreversible, we
shall be convinced that future man will be more and more completely
controlled by the very highest powers or aims to which this sequence
points. Otherwise we must disbelieve the continuity of history. But
the germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the
present. Hence--pardon the reiteration--if we can once trace this
sequence of dominant functions, whose evolution has filled past
ages, we can safely foretell something at least of man's future
development.

The argument and method is therefore purely historical. Here and
there we will try to find why and how things had to be so. But all
such digressions are of small account compared with the fact that
things were or are thus and so. And a mistaken explanation will not
invalidate the facts of history.

The subject of our history is the development, not of a single human
race nor of the movements of a century, but the development of
animal life through ages. And even if our attempts to decipher a few
pages here and there in the volumes of this vast biological history
are not as successful as we could hope, we must not allow ourselves
to be discouraged from future efforts. Even if our translation is
here and there at fault, we must never forget the existence of the
history. Some of the worst errors of biologists are due to their
having forgotten that in the lower stages the germs of the higher
must be present, even though invisible to any microscope. Our study
of the worm is inadequate and likely to mislead us, unless we
remember that a worm was the ancestor of man. And a biologist who
can tell us nothing about man is neglecting his fairest field.

Conversely history and social science will rest on a firmer basis
when their students recognize that many human laws and institutions
are heirlooms, the attainments, or direct results of attainments, of
animals far below man. We are just beginning to recognize that the
study of zooelogy is an essential prerequisite to, and firm
foundation for, that of history, social science, philosophy, and
theology, just as really as for medicine. An adequate knowledge of
any history demands more than the study of its last page. The
zooelogist has been remiss in not claiming his birthright, and in
this respect has sadly failed to follow the path pointed out by Mr.
Darwin.

For palaeontology, zooelogy, history, social and political science,
and philosophy are really only parts of one great science, of
biology in the widest sense, in distinction from the narrower sense
in which it is now used to include zooelogy and botany. They form an
organic unity in which no one part can be adequately understood
without reference to the others. You know nothing of even a
constellation, if you have studied only one of its stars. Much less
can the study of a single organ or function give an adequate idea of
the human body.

Only when we have attained a biological history can we have any
satisfactory conception of environment. As we look about us in the
world, environment often seems to us to be a chaos of forces aiding
or destroying good and bad, fit and unfit, alike.

But our history of animal and human progress shows us successive
stages, each a little higher than the preceding, and surviving, for
a time at least, because more completely conformed to environment.
If this be true, and it must be true unless our theory of evolution
be false, higher forms are more completely conformed to their
environment than lower; and man has attained the most complete
conformity of all. Our biological history is therefore a record of
the results of successive efforts, each attaining a little more
complete conformity than the preceding. From such a history we ought
to be able to draw certain valid deductions concerning the general
character and laws of our environment, to discover the direction in
which its forces are urging us, and how man can more completely
conform to it.

If man is a product of evolution, his mental and moral, just as
really as his physical, development must be the result of such a
conformity. The study of environment from this standpoint should
throw some light on the validity of our moral and religious creeds
and theories. It would seem, therefore, not only justifiable, but
imperative to attempt such a study.

Our argument is not directly concerned with modern theories of
heredity, or variation, or with the "omnipotence" or secondary
importance of natural selection. And yet Naegeli, and especially
Weismann, have had so marked an influence on modern thought that we
cannot afford to neglect their theories. We will briefly notice
these in the closing chapter.




CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION


The story of a human life can be told in very few words. A youth of
golden dreams and visions; a few years of struggle or of neglected
opportunities; then retrospect and the end.

"We come like water, and like wind we go."

But how few of the visions are realized. Faust sums up the whole of
life in the twice-repeated word _versagen_, renounce, and history
tells a similar story. Terah died in Haran; Abraham obtained but a
grave in the land promised him and his children; Jacob, cheated in
marriage, bitterly disappointed in his children, died in exile,
leaving his descendants to become slaves in the land of Egypt; and
Moses, their heroic deliverer, died in the mountains of Moab in
sight of the land which he was forbidden to enter. You may answer
that it is no injury that the promise is too large, the vision too
grand, to be fulfilled in the span of a single life, but must become
the heritage of a race. But what has been the history of Abraham's
descendants? A death-grapple for existence, captivity, and
dispersion. Their national existence has long been lost.

Was there ever a nation of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But
Greece died of premature old age, and Rome of rottenness begotten
of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to
the immortal race. But if Greece and Rome and a host of older
nations, of which History has often forgotten the very name, have
failed and died, can anything but ultimate failure await the race?
Is human history to prove a story told by an idiot, or does it
"signify" something? Is the great march of humanity, which Carlyle
so vividly depicts, "from the inane to the inane, or from God to
God?"

This is the sphinx question put to every thinking man, and on his
answer hangs his life. For according to that answer, he will either
flinch and turn back, or expend every drop of blood and grain of
power in urging on the march.

To this question the Bible gives a clear and emphatic answer. "God
created man in his own image," and then, as if men might refuse to
believe so astounding a statement, it is repeated, "in the image of
God created he him." When, and by what mode or process, man was
created we are not told. His origin is condensed almost into a line,
his present and future occupy all the rest of the book. Whence we
came is important only in so far as it teaches us humility and yet
assures us that we may be Godlike because we are His handiwork and
children, "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ of a heavenly
inheritance."

Now has Science any answer to this vital question? Perhaps. But this
much is certain; it can foretell the future only from the past. Its
answer to the question _whither_ must be an inference from its
knowledge as to _whence_ we have come. The Bible looks mainly at the
present and future; Science must at least begin with the study of
the past. The deciphering of man's past history is the great aim of
Biology, and ultimately of all Science. For the question of Man's
past is only a part of a greater question, the origin of all living
species.

We may say broadly that concerning the origin of species two
theories, and only two, seem possible. The first theory is that
every species is the result of an act of immediate creation. And
every true species, however slightly it may differ from its nearest
relative, represents such a creative act, and once created is
practically unchangeable. This is the theory of immutability of
species. According to the second theory all higher, probably all
present existing, species are only mediately the result of a
creative act. The first living germ, whenever and however created,
was infused with power to give birth to higher species. Of these and
their descendants some would continue to advance, others would
degenerate. Each theory demands equally for its ultimate explanation
a creative act; the second as much as, if not more than, the first.
According to the first theory the creative power has been
distributed over a series of acts, according to the second theory it
has been concentrated in one primal creation. The second is the
theory of the mutability of species, or, in general, of evolution,
but not necessarily of Darwinism alone.

The first theory is considered by many the more attractive and
hopeful. Now a theory need not be attractive, nor at first sight
appear hopeful, provided only it is true. But let me call your
attention to certain conclusions which, as it appears to me, are
necessarily involved in it. Its central thought is the practical
immutability of species. Each one of these lives its little span of
time, for species are usually comparatively short-lived, grows
possibly a very little better or worse, and dies. Its progress has
added nothing to the total of life; its degeneration harmed no one,
hardly even itself; it was doomed from the start. Progress there has
been, in a sense. The Creator has placed ever higher forms on the
globe. But all the progress lies in the gaps and distances between
successive forms, not in any advance made, or victory won, by the
species or individual. The most "aspiring ape," if ever there was
such a being, remains but an ape. He must comfort himself with the
thought that, while he and his descendants can never gain an inch,
the gap between himself and the next higher form shall be far
greater than that between himself and the lowest monkey.

And if this has been the history of thousands of other species, why
should it not be true of man also? Who can wonder that many who
accept this theory doubt whether the world is growing any better, or
whether even man will ever be higher and better than he now is?
Would it not be contrary to the whole course of past history, if you
can properly call such a record a history, if he could advance at
all? Now I have no wish to misrepresent this or any honestly
accepted theory, but it appears to me essentially hopeless, a record
not of the progress of life on the globe, but of a succession of
stagnations, of deaths. I can never understand why some very good
and intelligent people still think that the theory of the immediate
creation of each species does more honor to the Creator and his
creation than the theory of evolution. Evolution is a process, not
a force. The power of the Creator is equally demanded in both cases;
only it is differently distributed. And evolution is the very
highest proof of the wisdom and skill of the Creator. It elevates
our views of the living beings, must it not give a higher conception
of Him who formed them?

The plant in its first stages shows no trace of flowers, but of
leaves only. Later a branch or twig, similar in structure to all the
rest, shortens. The cells and tissues which in other twigs turn into
green leaves here become the petals and other organs of the rose or
violet. Let us suppose for a moment that every rose and violet
required a special act of immediate creation, would the springtime
be as wonderful as now? Would the rose or violet be any more
beautiful, or are they any less flowers because developed out of
that which might have remained a common branch? The plant at least
is glorified by the power to give rise to such beauty. And is not
the creation of the seed of a violet or rose something infinitely
grander than the decking of a flowerless plant with newly created
roses? The attainment of the highest and most diversified beauty and
utility with the fewest and simplest means is always the sign of
what we call in man "creative" genius. Is not the same true of God?
I think you all feel the force of the argument here.

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