Part 13 (1/2)

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Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work, Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of evolution is livingly absent. But there are never wanting minds to whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge. ”The individual withers, and the world is more and more,” to these writers; and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'

has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_. We all know, too, how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a 'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned. Mr. Spencer, at the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the 'great-man theory' of history, from which a few pa.s.sages may be quoted:--

”The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural?

Then he is a deputy G.o.d, and we have theocracy once removed,--or, rather, not removed at all.... Is this an unacceptable solution? Then the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is recognized, he must be cla.s.sed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its inst.i.tutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its mult.i.tudinous arts and appliances, he is a _resultant_.... You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him. All those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.”[7]

Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who believe in the power of initiative of the great man.

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Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is largely due to J. S. Mill's example. I may possibly be wrong about the facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not 'resting in general notions.' And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries 'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he, not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'

The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.

It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, ”G.o.d is great.” _Not_ to fall back on the G.o.ds, where a proximate principle may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.

To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal and consummation, of science. If she is simply to lead us out of the labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the darkness at all. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can remake it. Physiological forces, with which {235} the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him. Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.

Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there,--as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak? And does he mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter how often you pa.s.s a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level remains unchanged? Or might the subst.i.tute arise at 'Stratford-atte-Bowe'? Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.

We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning. This widely informed, suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that individuals have no initiative in determining social change.

”The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the {236} physical circ.u.mstances to which they are exposed. If it be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various races. If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who inhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who went to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and indigestible port.... The differentiating agency must be sought in the great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of every nation upon the earth.... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circ.u.mstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.

There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding causes.”[9]

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Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--

”It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical h.e.l.las, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated without a cause.”[10]

This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no _tertium quid_ between outward environment and miracle. _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!

_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!

If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the outward cycle of visible nature and man, his a.s.sertion is simply physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself'

whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical conditions' the whole of nature, his a.s.sertion, though true, forms but the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or scientific character.

And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_ conditions of a given result? The French say that to have an omelet we must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does an omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind.

To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial dealings with the world as the geographical h.e.l.las afforded are a necessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why did not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence? No geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have that number. He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} not which,--but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.

Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has done with h.e.l.las. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show that the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the one necessary and only possible form.

Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a fauna and its environment are. An animal may better his chances of existence in either of many ways,--growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean; small and swift, or ma.s.sive and bulky; spiny, h.o.r.n.y, slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other ways besides,--and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely different environments.

Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking ill.u.s.trations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--