"ON the Earth there will never be a
higher Creature than Man. It is a daring prophecy, but every probability
of Science attests the likelihood of its fulfilment. The goal looked forward
to from the beginning of time has been attained. Nature has succeeded in
making a Man; she can go no further; Organic Evolution has done its work.
This is not a conceit of Science, nor a reminiscence
of the pre-Copernican idea that the centre of the universe is the world,
and the centre of the world Man. It is the sober scientific probability
that with the body of Man the final fruit of the tree of Organic Evolution
has appeared; that the highest possibilities open to flesh and bone and
nerve and muscle have now been realized; that in whatever direction, and
with whatever materials, Evolution still may work, it will never produce
any material thing more perfect in design or workmanship; that in Man,
in short, about this time in history, we are confronted with a stupendous
crisis in Nature, --the Arrest of the Animal. The Man, the Animal Man,
the Man of Organic Evolution, it is at least certain, will not go on. It
is another Man who will go on, a Man within this Man; and that he may go
on the first Man must stop. Let us try for a moment to learn what it is
to stop. Nothing could teach Man better what is meant by his going on.
One of the most perfect pieces of mechanism
in the human body is the Hand. How long it has taken to develop may be
dimly seen by a glance at the long array of less accurate instruments of
prehension which shade away with ever decreasing delicacy and perfectness
as we descend the scale of animal life. At the bottom of that scale is
the Amoeba. It is a speck of protoplasmic jelly, headless, footless, and
armless. When it wishes to seize the microscopic particle of food on which
it lives a portion of its body lengthens out, and, moving towards the object,
flows over it, engulfs it, and melts back again into the body. This is
its Hand. At any place, and at any moment, it creates a Hand. Each Hand
is extemporized as it is needed; when not needed it is not. Pass a little
higher up the scale and observe the Sea-Anemone. The Hand is no longer
extemporized as occasion requires, but lengthened portions of the body
are set apart and kept permanently in shape for the purpose of seizing
food. Here, in the capital of twining tentacles which crowns the quivering
pillar of the body, we get the rude approximation to the most useful portion
of the human Hand--the separated fingers. It is a vast improvement on the
earlier Hand, but the jointless digits are still imperfect; it is simply
the Amoeba Hand cut into permanent strips.
Passing over a multitude of intermediate
forms, watch, in the next place, the Hand of an African Monkey. Note the
great increase in usefulness due to the muscular arm upon which the Hand
is now extended, and the extraordinary capacity for varied motion afforded
by the three-fold system of jointing at shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The
Hand itself is almost the human Hand; there are palm and nail and articulated
fingers. But observe how one circumstance hinders the possessor from taking
full advantage of these great improvements,--this Hand has no thumb, or
if it has, it is but a rudiment. To estimate the importance of this apparently
insignificant organ, try for a moment without using the thumb to hold a
book, or write a letter, or do any single piece of manual work. A thumb
is not merely an additional finger, but a finger so arranged as to be opposable
to the other fingers, and thus possesses a practical efficacy
greater than all the fingers put together. It is this which gives the organ
the power to seize, to hold, to manipulate, to do higher work; this simple
mechanical device in short endows the Hand of intelligence with all its
capacity and skill. Now there are animals, like the Colobi, which have
no thumb at all; there are others, like the Marmoset, which possess the
thumb, but in which it is not opposable; and there are others, the Chimpanzee
for instance, in which the Hand is in all essentials identical with Man's.
In the human form the thumb is a little longer, and the whole member more
delicate and shapely, but even for the use of her highest product, Nature
has not been able to make anything much more perfect than the hand of this
anthropoid ape.
Is the Hand then finished? Can Nature take
out no new patent in this direction? Is the fact that no novelty is introduced
in the case of Man a proof that the ultimate Hand has appeared? By no means.
And yet it is probable for other reasons that the ultimate Hand has appeared;
that there will never be a more perfectly handed animal than Man. And why?
Because the causes which up to this point have furthered the evolution
of the Hand have begun to cease to act. In the perfecting of the bodily
organs, as of all other mechanical devices, necessity is the mother of
invention. As the Hand was given more and more to do, it became more and
more adapted to its work. Up to a point, it responded directly to each
new duty that was laid upon it. But only up to a point. There came a time
when the necessities became too numerous and too varied for adaptation
to keep pace with them. And the fatal day came, the fatal day for the Hand,
when he who bore it made a new discovery. It was the discovery of Tools.
Henceforth what the Hand used to do, and was slowly becoming adapted to
do better, was to be done by external appliances. So that if anything new
arose to be done, or to be better done, it was not a better Hand that was
now made but a better tool. Tools are external Hands. Levers are the extensions
of the bones of the arm. Hammers are callous substitutes for the fist.
Knives do the work of nails. The vice and the pincers replace the fingers.
The day that Cave-man first split the marrow bone of a bear by thrusting
a stick into it, and striking it home with a stone--that day the doom of
the Hand was sealed.
But has not Man to make his tools, and will
not that induce the development of the Hand to an as yet unknown perfection?
No. Because tools are not made with the Hand. They are made with the Brain.
For a time, certainly, Man had to make his tools, and for a time this work
recompensed him physically, and the arm became elastic and the fingers
dexterous and strong. But soon he made tools to make these tools. In place
of shaping things with the Hand, he invented the turning-lathe; to save
his fingers he requisitioned the loom; instead of working his muscles he
gave out the contract to electricity and steam. Man, therefore, from this
time forward will cease to develop materially these organs of his body.
If he develops them outside his body, filling the world everywhere with
artificial Hands, supplying the workshops with fingers more intricate and
deft than Organic Evolution could make in a millennium, and loosing energies
upon them infinitely more gigantic than his muscles could generate in a
life-time, it is enough. Evolution after all is a slow process. Its great
labour is to work up to a point where Invention shall be possible, and
where, by the powers of the human mind, and by the mechanical utilization
of the energies of the universe, the results of ages of development may
be anticipated. Further changes, therefore, within the body itself are
made unnecessary. Evolution has taken a new departure. For the Arrest of
the Hand is not the cessation of Evolution but its immense acceleration,
and the re-direction of its energies into higher channels.
Take up the functions of the animal body
one by one, and it will be seen how the same arresting finger is laid upon
them all. To select an additional illustration, consider the power of Sight.
Without pausing to trace the steps by which the Eye has reached its marvellous
perfection, or to estimate the ages spent in polishing its lenses and adjusting
the diaphragms and screws, ask the simple question whether, under the conditions
of modern civilization, anything now is being added to its quickening efficiency,
or range. Is it not rather the testimony of experience that if anything
its power has begun to wane? Europe even now affords the spectacle of at
least one nation so short-sighted that it might almost be called a myopic
race. The same causes, in fact, that led to the Arrest of the Hand are
steadily working to stop the development of the Eye. Man, when he sees
with difficulty, does not now improve his Eye; he puts on a pince-nez.
Spectacles--external eyes--have superseded the work of Evolution. When
his sight is perfect up to a point, and he desires to examine objects so
minute as to lie beyond the limit of that point, he will not wait for Evolution
to catch up upon his demand and supply him, or his children's children,
with a more perfect instrument. He will invest in a microscope. Or when
he wishes to extend his gaze to the moon and stars, he does not hope to
reach to-morrow the distances which to-day transcend him. He invents the
telescope. Organic Evolution has not even a chance. In every direction
the external eye has replaced the internal, and it is even difficult to
suggest where any further development of this part of the animal can now
come in. There are still, and in spite of all instruments, regions in which
the unaided organs of Man may continue to find a field for the fullest
exercise, but the area is slowly narrowing, and in every direction the
appliances of Science tempt the body to accept those supplements of the
Arts, which, being accepted, involve the discontinuance of development
for all the parts concerned. Even where a mechanical appliance, while adding
range to a bodily sense, has seemed to open a door for further improvement,
some correlated discovery in a distant field of science, as by some remorseless
fate, has suddenly taken away the opportunity and offered to the body only
an additional inducement for neglect. Thus it might be thought that the
continuous use of the telescope, in the attempt to discover more and more
indistinct and distant heavenly bodies, might tend to increase the efficiency
of the Eye. But that expectation has vanished already before a further
fruit of Man's inventive power. By an automatic photographic apparatus
fixed to the telescope, an Eye is now created vastly more delicate and
in many respects more efficient than the keenest eye of Man. In at least
five important particulars the Photographic Eye is the superior of the
Eye of Organic Evolution. It can see where the human Eye, even with the
best aids of optical instruments, sees nothing at all; it can distinguish
certain objects with far greater clearness and definition; owing to the
rapidity of its action it can instantly detect changes which are too sudden
for the human eye to follow; it can look steadily for hours without growing
tired; and it can record what it sees with infallible accuracy upon a plate
which time will not efface. How long would it take Organic Evolution to
arrive at an Eye of such amazing quality and power? And with such a piece
of mechanism available, who, rather than employ it even to the neglect
of his organs of vision, would be content to await the possible attainment
of an equal perfection by his descendants some million years hence? Is
there not here a conspicuous testimony to the improbability of a further
Evolution of the sense of Sight in civilized communities--in other words,
another proof of the Arrest of the Animal? What defiance of Evolution,
indeed, what affront to Nature, is this? Man prepares a complicated telescope
to supplement the Eye created by Evolution, and no sooner is it perfected
than it occurs to him to create another instrument to aid the Eye in what
little work is left for it to do. That is to say, he first makes a mechanical
supplement to his Eye, then constructs a mechanical Eye, which is better
than his own, to see through it, and ends by discarding, for many purposes,
the Eye of Organic Evolution altogether.
As regards the other functions of civilized
Man, the animal in almost every direction has reached its maximum. Civilization--and
the civilized state, be it remembered, is the ultimate goal of every race
and nation--is always attended by deterioration of some of the senses.
Every man pays a definite price or forfeit for his taming. The sense of
smell, compared with its development among the lower animals, is in civilized
Man already all but gone. Compared even with a savage, it is an ascertained
fact that the civilized Man in this respect is vastly inferior. So far
as hearing is concerned, the main stimulus--fear of surprise by enemies--has
ceased to operate, and the muscles for the erection of the ears have fallen
into disuse. The ear itself in contrast with that of the savage is slow
and dull, while compared with the quick sense of the lower animals, the
organ is almost deaf. The skin, from the continuous use of clothes, has
forfeited its protective power. Owing to the use of viands cooked, the
muscles of the jaw are rapidly losing strength. The teeth, partly for a
similar reason, are undergoing marked degeneration. The third molar, for
instance, among some nations is already showing symptoms of suppression,
and that this threatens ultimate extinction may be reasoned from the fact
that the anthropoid apes have fewer teeth than the lower monkeys, and these
fewer than the preceding generation of insectivorous mammals.
In an age of vehicles and locomotives the
lower limbs find their occupation almost gone. For mere muscle, that on
which his whole life once depended, Man has almost now no use. Agility,
nimbleness, strength, once a stern necessity, are either a luxury or a
pastime. Their outlet is the cricket-field or the tennis-court. To keep
them up at all, artificial means--dumb-bells, parallel-bars, clubs--have
actually to be devised. Vigour of limb is not to be found in common life,
we look for it in the Gymnasium; agility is relegated to the Hippodrome.
Once all men were athletes; now you have to pay to see them. More or less
with all the animal powers it is the same. To some extent at least some
phonograph may yet speak for us, some telephone hear for us, the typewriter
write for us, chemistry digest for us, and incubation nurture us. So everywhere
the Man as Animal is in danger of losing ground. He has expanded until
the world is his body. The former body, the hundred and fifty pounds or
so of organized tissue he carries about with him, is little more than a
mark of identity. It is not he who is there, he cannot be there,
or anywhere, for he is everywhere. The material part of him is reduced
to a symbol; it is but a link with the wider framework of the Arts, a belt
between machinery and machinery. His body no longer generates, but only
utilizes energy; alone he is but a tool, a medium, a turncock of the physical
forces.
Now with what feelings do we regard all this?
Is not the crowning proof of the thesis under review that we watch this
evidence accumulating against the body with no emotion and hear the doom
of our clay pronounced without a regret? It is nothing to aspiring Man
to watch the lower animals still perfecting their mechanism and putting
all his physical powers and senses to the shame. It is nothing to him to
be distanced in nimbleness by the deer: has he not his bullet? Or in strength
by the horse: has he not bit and bridle? Or in vision by the eagle: his
field-glass out-sees it. How easily we talk of the body as a thing without
us, as an impersonal it And how naturally when all is over, do we advertise
its irrelevancy to ourselves by consigning its borrowed atoms to
the anonymous dust. The fact is, in one aspect, the body, to Intelligence,
is all but an absurdity. One is almost ashamed to have one. The idea of
having to feed it, and exercise it, and humour it, and put it away in the
dark to sleep, to carry it about with one everywhere, and not only it but
its wardrobe--other material things to make this material thing warm or
keep it cool--the whole situation is a comedy. But judge what it would
be if this exacting organism went on evolving, multiplied its members,
added to its intricacy, waxed instead of waned? So complicated is it already
that one shrinks from contemplating a future race having to keep in repair
an apparatus more involved and delicate. The practical advantage is enormous
of having all improvements henceforth external, of having insensate organs
made of iron and steel rather than of wasting muscle and palpitating nerve.
For these can be kept at no physiological cost, they cannot impede the
other machinery, and when that finally comes to the last break-down there
will be the fewer wheels to stop.
So great indeed is the advantage of increasing
mechanical supplements to the physical frame rather than exercising the
physical frame itself, that this will become nothing short of a temptation;
and not the least anxious task of future civilization will be to prevent
degeneration beyond a legitimate point, and keep up the body to its highest
working level. For the first thing to be learned from these facts is not
that the Body is nothing and must now decay, but that it is most of all
and more than ever worthy to be preserved. The moment our care of it slackens,
the Body asserts itself. It comes out from under arrest--which is the one
thing to be avoided. Its true place by the ordained appointment of Nature
is where it can be ignored; if through disease, neglect, or injury it returns
to consciousness the effect of Evolution is undone. Sickness is degeneration;
pain the signal to resume the evolution. On the one hand, one must "reckon
the Body dead"; on the other, one must think of it in order not to
think of it.
This arrest of physical development at a
specific point is not confined to Man. Everywhere in the organic world
science is confronted with arrested types. While endless groups of plant
and animal forms have advanced during the geological ages, other whole
groups have apparently stood still-- stood still, that is to say, not in
time but in organization. If Nature is full of moving things, it is also
full of fixtures. Thirty-one years ago Mr. Huxley devoted the anniversary
Address of the Geological Society to a consideration of what he called
"Persistent Types of Life," and threw down to Evolutionists a
puzzle which has never yet been fully solved. While some forms attained
their climacteric tens of thousands of years ago and perished, others persevered,
and, without advancing in any material respect, are alive to this day.
Among the most ancient Carboniferous plants, for instance, are found certain
forms generically identical with those now living. The cone of the existing
Araucaria is scarcely to be distinguished from that of an Oolite form.
The Tabulate Corals of the Silurian period are similar to those which exist
to-day. The Lamp-shells of our present seas so abounded at the same ancient
date as to give their name to one of the great groups of Silurian rocks--the
Lingula Flags. Star-fishes and urchins, almost the same as those which
tenant the coast-lines of our present seas, crawled along what are now
among the most ancient fossiliferous rocks. Both of the forms just named,
the Brachiopods and the Echinoderms, have come down to us almost unchanged
through the nameless gap of time which separates the Silurian and Old Red
Sandstone periods from the present era.
This constancy of structure reveals a conservatism
in Nature, as unexpected as it is widespread. Does it mean that the architecture
of living things has a limit beyond which development cannot go? Does it
mean that the morphological possibilities along certain lines of bodily
structure have exhausted themselves, that the course of conceivable development
in these instances has actually run out? In Gothic Architecture, or in
Norman, there are terminal points which, once reached, can be but little
improved upon. Without limiting working efficiency, they can go no further.
These styles in the very nature of things seem to have limits. Mr. Ruskin
has indeed assured us that there are only three possible forms of good
architecture in the world; Greek, the architecture of the Lintel; Romanesque,
the architecture of the Rounded Arch; Gothic, the architecture of the Gable.
"All the architects in the world will never discover any other way
of bridging a space than these three, the Lintel, the Round Arch, the Gable;
they may vary the curve of the arch, or curve the sides of the gable, or
break them down; but in doing this they are merely modifying or sub-dividing,
not adding to the generic form.
In some such way, there may be terminal generic
forms in the architecture of animals; and the persistent types just named
may represent in their several directions the natural limits of possible
modification. No further modification of a radical kind, that is to say,
could in these instances be introduced without detriment to practical efficiency.
These terminal forms thus mark a normal maturity, a goal; they represent
the ends of the twigs of the tree of life.
Now consider the significance of that fact.
Nature is not an interminable succession. It is not always a becoming.
Sometimes things arrive. The Lamp-shells have arrived, they are part of
the permanent furniture of the world; along that particular line, there
will probably never be anything higher. The Star-fishes also have arrived,
and the Sea-urchins, and the Nautilus, and the Bony Fishes, the Tapirs,
and possibly the Horse--all these are highly divergent forms which have
run out the length of their tether and can go no further. When the plan
of the world was made, to speak teleologically, these types of life were
assigned their place and limit, and there they have remained. If it were
wanted to convey the impression that Nature had some large end in view,
that she was not drifting aimlessly towards a general higher level, it
could not have been done more impressively than by everywhere placing on
the field of Science these fixed points, these innumerable consummations,
these clean-cut mountain peaks, which for millenniums have never grown.
Even as there is a plan in the parts, there is a plan in the whole.
But the most certain of all these "terminal
points" in the evolution of Creation is the body of Man. Anatomy places
Man at the head of all other animals that were ever made; but what is infinitely
more instructive, with him, as we have just seen, the series comes to an
end. Man is not only the highest branch, but the highest possible branch
Take as a last witness the testimony of anatomy itself with regard to the
human brain. Here the fact is not only re-affirmed but the rationale of
it suggested in terms of scientific law. "The development of the brain
is in connection with a whole system of development of the head and face
which cannot be carried further than in Man. For the mode in which the
cranial cavity is gradually increased in size is a regular one, which may
be explained thus: we may look on the skull as an irregular cylinder, and
at the same time that it is expanded by increase of height and width it
also undergoes a curvature or bending on itself, so that the base is crumpled
together while the roof is elongated. This curving has gone on in Man till
the fore end of the cylinder, the part on which the brain rests above the
nose, is nearly parallel to the aperture of communication of the skull
with the spinal canal, i.e. the cranium has a curve of 180deg. or
a few degrees more or less. This curving of the base of the skull involves
change in position of the face bones also, and could not go on to a further
extent without cutting off the nasal cavity from the throat. . . . Thus
there is anatomical evidence that the development of the vertebrate form
has reached its limit by completion in Man.
This author's conception of the whole field
of living nature is so suggestive that we may continue the quotation: "To
me the animal kingdom appears not in indefinite growth like a tree, but
a temple with many minarets, none of them capable of being prolonged--while
the central dome is completed by the structure of man. The development
of the animal kingdom is the development of intelligence chained to matter;
the animals in which the nervous system has reached the greatest perfection
are the vertebrates, and in Man that part of the nervous system which is
the organ of intelligence reaches, as I have sought to show, the highest
development possible to a vertebrate animal, while intelligence has grown
to reflection and volition. On these grounds, I believe, not that Man is
the highest possible intelligence, but that the human body is the highest
form of human life possible, subject to the conditions of matter on the
surface of the globe, and that the structure completes the design of the
animal kingdom.
Never was the body of Man greater than with
this sentence of suspension passed on it, and never was Evolution more
wonderful or more beneficent than when the signal was given to stop working
at Man's animal frame. This was an era in the world's history. For it betokened
nothing less than that the cycle of matter was now complete, and the one
prefatory task of the ages finished. Henceforth the Weltanschauung
is for ever changed. From this pinnacle of matter is seen at last what
matter is for, and all the lower lives that ever lived appear as but the
scaffolding for this final work. The whole sub-human universe finds its
reason for existence in its last creation, its final justification in the
new immaterial order which opened with its close. Cut off Man from Nature,
and, metaphysical necessity apart, there remains in Nature no divinity.
To include Man in Evolution is not to lower Man to the level of Nature,
but to raise Nature to his high estate. There he was made, these atoms
are his confederates, these plant cells raised him from the dust, these
travailing animals furthered his Ascent: shall he excommunicate them now
that their work is done? Plant and animal have each their end, but Man
is the end of all the ends. The latest science reinstates him, where poet
and philosopher had already placed him, as at once the crown, the master,
and the rationale of creation. "Not merely," says Kant, "is
he like all organized beings an end in nature, but also here on earth the
last end of nature, in reference to whom all other natural things constitute
a system of ends." Yet it is not because he is the end of ends, but
the beginning of beginnings, that the completion of the Body marks a crisis
in the past. At last Evolution had culminated in a creation so complex
and exalted as to form the foundation for an inconceivably loftier super-organic
order. The moment an organism was reached through which Thought was possible,
nothing more was required of matter. The Body was high enough. Organic
Evolution might now even resign its sovereignty of the world; it had made
a thing which was now its master. Henceforth Man should take charge of
Evolution even as up till now he had been the one charge of it. Henceforth
his selection should replace Natural Selection; his judgment guide the
struggle for life; his will determine for every plant upon the earth whether
it should bloom or fade, for every animal whether it should increase, or
change, or die. So Man entered into his Kingdom.
Science is charged, be it once more recalled,
with numbering Man among the beasts, and levelling his body with the dust.
But he who reads for himself the history of creation as it is written by
the hand of Evolution will be overwhelmed by the glory and honour heaped
upon this creature. To be a Man, and to have no conceivable successor;
to be the fruit and crown of the long past eternity, and the highest possible
fruit and crown; to be the last victor among the decimated phalanxes of
earlier existences, and to be nevermore defeated; to be the best that Nature
in her strength and opulence can produce; to be the first of that new order
of beings who by their dominion over the lower world and their equipment
for a higher, reveal that they are made in the Image of God--to be this
is to be elevated to a rank in Nature more exalted than any philosophy
or any poetry or any theology have ever given to Man. Man was always told
that his place was high; the reason for it he never knew till now; he never
knew that his title deeds were the very laws of Nature, that he alone was
the Alpha and Omega of Creation, the beginning and the end of Matter, the
final goal of Life.
Nature is full of new departures; but never
since time began was there anything approaching in importance that period
when the slumbering animal, Brain, broke into intelligence, and the Creature
first felt that it had a Mind. From that dateless moment a higher and swifter
progress of the world began. Henceforth, Intelligence triumphed over structural
adaptation. The wise were naturally selected before the strong. The Mind
discovered better methods, safer measures, shorter cuts. So the body learned
to refer to it, then to defer to it. As the Mind was given more to do,
it enlarged and did its work more perfectly. Gradually the favours of Evolution--
exercise, alteration, differentiation, addition--which were formerly distributed
promiscuously among the bodily organs--were now lavished mainly upon the
Brain. The gains accumulated with accelerating velocity; and by sheer superiority
and fitness for its work, the Intellect rose to commanding power, and entered
into final possession of a monopoly which can never be disturbed.
Now this means not only that an order of
higher animals has appeared upon the earth, but that an altogether new
page in the history of the universe has begun to be written. It means nothing
less than that the working of Evolution has changed its course. Once it
was a physical universe, now it is a psychical universe. And to say that
the working of Evolution has changed its course, and set its compass in
psychical directions, is to call attention to the most remarkable fact
in Nature. Nothing so original or so revolutionary has ever been given
to science to discover, to ponder, or to proclaim. The power of this event
to strike and rouse the mind will depend upon one's sense of what the working
of Evolution has been to the world; but those who realize this even dimly
will see that no emphasis of language can exaggerate its significance.
Let imagination do its best to summon up the past of Nature. Beginning
with the panorama of the Nebular Hypothesis, run the eye over the field
of Palaeontology, Geology, Botany, and Zoology. Watch the majestic drama
of Creation unfolding, scene by scene and act by act. Realize that one
power, and only one, has marshalled the figures for this mighty spectacle;
that one hand, and only one, has carried out these transformations; that
one principle, and only one, has controlled each subsidiary plot and circumstance;
that the same great patient unobtrusive law has guided and shaped the whole
from its beginnings in bewilderment and chaos to its end in order, harmony,
and beauty. Then watch the curtain drop. And as it moves to rise again,
behold the new actor upon the stage. Silently, as all great changes come,
Mental Evolution has succeeded Organic. All the things that have been now
lie in the far background as forgotten properties. And Man stands alone
in the foreground, and a new thing, Spirit, strives within him.