Review of the Book

Evolution And The War
by P. Chalmers Mitchell

Alexander MacKenrick

[At the time, Dr. Mitchell was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London.
This review appeared in the Single Tax Review, July-August 1915]

Among the countless books that have poured from the British and American press as a reaction to the stimulus occasioned by the European Revolution, that one which bears the title at the head of this article and which has been written by Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, of the Zoological Society of London, deserves the attention of those who seek through clear vision and right understanding of the nature of things, to mould the future of Society.

No more tragic psychological catastrophy has ever been precipitated by blundering humanity, than the perversion of the doctrines of Darwin by the prophets of German political philosophy, Trietchke, Bemhardi and others, in their attempts to justify aggressive warfare by invoking the theory of the struggle for existence as the means by which progress has been and must be effected. Dr. Mitchell has done what was much required for the clarification of thought on this most important subject. It is unfortunately true that the popular mind has become magnetized by the phrases and catch-words of some of Darwin's successors, who have familiarized us with such expressions as "Nature red in tooth and claw," "Survival of the fittest," "The perpetual effort to catch and eat and to avoid being caught and eaten;" and so has become predisposed to think of the past history of the world as a battle-ground where a ruthless war of extermination has been constantly going on; and that the horror of it is just the price we have paid and must continue to pay for all that we call progress in civilization. The popular mind, therefore, has been by its induced condition, compelled to an unwilling assent to such propositions as that of Bemhardi's, "Wherever we look in Nature we find that war is a fundamental law of development. This great verity, which has been recognized in past ages, has been convincingly demonstrated in modem times by Charles Darwin." Few of us, even those who are most familiar with the writings of the great naturalist, have had the courage to boldly put a mark of interrogation against such dogmatic statements as this. But Dr. Mitchell has done it, and done it most effectively, and for that service all who wish to retain something of their faith in the ultimate supremacy of Good, must feel deeply grateful.

"Eyes and ears," said Heracitus, "are bad witnesses to those who have barbaric souls." It is one of the most difficult lessons given humanity to learn, that the chances of our rightly interpreting even the most obvious facts of experience, depend upon the quality of the emotions under which we collect, collate, and reason from them. And when the facts from which theories of life have been deduced are not those which have come under the philosopher's own observation, but have had to be re-interpreted from the interpretations of another man, the probability of wrong conclusions is increased many fold. Professor Royce's illuminative analogy as to percepts and concepts (facts of experience and thoughts about such facts) having no validity beyond the confines of the mind in which they were coined or issued until they were translated or interpreted into the thought currency of other minds has a strong bearing here. Everything depends upon the accuracy with which the re-interpretation is made. In proportion to the importance of the truths a great teacher has given to the world and the sublimity of the mind through which his experiences have been conveyed to mankind, are the chances that the re-interpretations of his deductions will be distorted and mis-interpreted. The whole history of the rise and progress of institutional Christianity has been a record of mis-interpretations and remisinterpretations of the message originally delivered to the race.

No modern nature-searcher or philosopher has suffered more from such misinterpretation than Charles Darwin. Probably none but his most intimate contemporaries who could read his spirit into the intractable medium of language in which his nature-interpretations were set forth, can have correctly envisaged his cosmological conception of the world. To realize even slightly, the delicacy and danger of error in attempting to mediate between a great thinker and the world, is to stand amazed at the unconscious audacity with which the German war prophets rushed in to capture the Darwinian theory of Natural selection as a buttress for their ambition to impose German "kultur" by force of arms upon an unwilling world.

That Darwin represented the struggle for existence as an internecine warfare between species, much less as a warfare between members or groups of the same species, is as Dr. Mitchell has shown, a most unwarrantable assumption. Nothing is more obvious from a study of Darwin when entered upon with no subjective preconceptions, than that the struggle which he postulated is one of adaptation to external conditions of temperature, humidity, air-pressure, soil and food, in which struggle those unadapted to the conditions failed to survive, while those only who could adapt themselves to the environment continued to live, and handed on to their progeny the qualities that had aided their survival. That among these external conditions the danger from predatory enemies among superior species, and the necessity of finding food by the killing of inferior species, must be given a place, may be admitted; but this is an entirely different proposition from that which assumes a constant antagonism between groups within species, or between members of the same species.

Countless writings might be named, such as Kropotkin's "Mutual aid among animals and men" which go to prove that the social instinct, the tendency to co-operation and mutual helpfulness, have played a far greater part in the evolution of animal life and particularly human life, than have the competitive or warring instincts. Indeed, it may well be maintained that but for the deeply rooted instinct towards mutual aid, species could never have evolved at all. If war had been, as Berhardi affirms, "the fundamental law of development," the imagination would recoil upon itself in the attempt to picture anything but a perpetual see-saw or rythmic oscillation on the plane of mere brute force. Huxley, who was probably the clearest sighted and most sympathetic among all Darwin's disciples and expositers, and who realized perfectly that the struggle for existence had been in the main a battle of adaptation to nature's conditions, maintained that it could only have been through a suspension of the cosmic process by which the weak were allowed to go to the wall, and a substitution therefor of the principle of mutual aid and co-operation for common ends, that intellectual development and emotional refinement became possible. It is not necessary, therefore, to appeal to the religious mystics or the poets or any of those whom philosophers of the Berhardi type would regard as impractical dreamers, for support in the belief that progress in all that makes human life valuable is bound up with the cessation of war.

The most sane and unmystical among our physicists and interrogators of nature, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske and others, have been at one in recognizing that only as the religion of enmity gives place to the religion of amity, only as swords become beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, only as brute force becomes sublimated into mental strength, as competition for selfish ends becomes combination for common ends, as the desire to be served is transmuted into the aspiration to serve, can humanity rise to the levels of intellectual and emotional refinement implied by the word "culture." To have realized the unanimity with which Darwin and the greatest of his followers and interpreters have recognized that Culture literally "waits" upon the advent of Social justice, upon freedom and peace, friendliness and co-operation, and all that is included in the moral law, is to realize the colossal illogicality and folly involved in the appeal to Darwin for a justification of aggressive warfare. It is indeed, as Dr. Chalmers points out, one of the deepest ironies that the country of Kant who referred scientific laws to the category of theoretical reason, and the Moral law to that of practical reason, should be the nation to base its action on the theories or generalizations of evolutionary science.

But even if his appeal to the doctrine of natural selection for a sanction to the continuance of militarism could be substantiated; even if it could be proven to the satisfaction of pure unbiased reason that war had been up till now a fundamental law of development, the last word in the court of reason would not have been spoken. This Dr. Mitchell makes abundantly clear. Nothing is more dangerous than reasoning by analogy from one stage of development to another, and every man who is conscious of having grown or risen to higher levels of insight and wisdom knows that he can find justifications for his conduct of twenty years ago which by no amount of casuistry could justify the same conduct now. The enlarged vision, the broader field of knowledge, bring with them an obligation to revise the standards of action, to adopt new rules and formulate new principles. When man became a conscious soul knowing good and evil; when he was taken into what may be called a junior partnership with the creative intelligence; when he became to some extent the arbiter of his own destiny and was endowed with some measure of the power of self-determination; then he entered upon a new life in which the things of the past had no jurisdiction. The mechanical laws of reflex action, or unconscious instinct, or even of unconscious intelligence, have no validity in the world of self-creative character-building. "Old things have passed away and all things have become new," and it is not permissible in the high court of reason to appeal to laws that are alleged to have been valid in a condition that exists no more.

The outstanding lesson that flows from a right understanding of Darwinism is that each new characteristic that has been evolved in the successive stages of development must have had "a survival value," the first to suggest that when in the upward-reaching process of evolution from ape-hood to man-hood, intelligence first emerged and gave its possessor an advantage in the ability to adapt himself to environment, nature then ceased to "select" the purely physical qualities of brute strength. From that moment onwards the brain with the greater number of convolutions was "preferred," and merely ph3rsical qualities no longer weighed in the balance of advantage. William James has conclusively shown that the capacity to acquire knowledge must have had a pragmatic or utilitarian end; must in short have been useful in aiding survival; and that thus all the higher qualities that distinguish man from the brute gradually replaced the lower ones as tests of fitness to survive. Can it be doubted that when men discovered the survival value to the race of mutual aid, cooperation and friendliness, nature seized upon this as she had done ages earlier upon brain-power, and gave it a status among those qualities that aid in the struggle of adaptation to environment? If we could in the words of Emerson, "learn to believe what the years and centuries tell us as against the hours and the days," we should see plainly that the fighting instincts have no survival value on the higher plane of conscious human life. In the words of Dr. Mitchell, "it is at least clear that Darwin cannot fairly be cited, as Berhardi and others have taken him, as a witness for the proposition that war is the great elevating force of nations."

"Man is a creature of a large discourse, looking before and after." Here we touch upon the principle that invalidates all attempts to apply the laws of life on a lower plane where conscious self-determination had not emerged, to the life of mankind as we now know it. Whether consciousness, the sense of freedom and the moral imperative lay potentially in the cosmic dust from which by a mental necessity we conceive all things to have evolved, or were interpolated from an external source at some point in the upward path, as Russell Wallace assumes, we are helplessly unable to decide. But, as Dr. Mitchell appositely observes, two considerations drawn from experience may aid us to a comprehension of the process of their development. "First," he says, "the properties of a compound are not merely the sum of the properties of the constituents of the compound. Who could infer the quality of water simply from a knowledge of the properties of oxygen and hydrogen? What strange and complex alchemy may we not expect when the various animal instincts, facilities and qualities have surged up into the field of the human mind, there to be irradiated by human consciousness and set dancing in new and harmonious concert?

Second, there is the occurrence of what are called critical phases in continuous processes, points at which the character and qualities change quite suddenly." Without following Dr. Mitchell into his amplifications of these two facts of common observation, it will suffice to say that by whatever process they have arrived, consciousness and the sense of self-creative freedom in man differentiate him from all the remainder of the animal world, and forbid him as a reasonable being from making appeal to the lower world from which he has sprung in defence of his action as one who has "eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and become as the Gods."

Sir Edwin Ray Lancaster, in an illuminative book entitled The Kingdom of Man, enunciates the opinion that the only stubbornly hereditable or transmissible quality in animal life including that of man is a tendency to respond to changes in environment. He tells of experiments that were made by selecting a number of animals who were known to have lived for at least a thousand generations under the same conditions, and consequently to have undergone no change. Here, if anywhere, it was argued, specific characters should have become absolutely fixed. These animals were removed to the opposite side of the globe where conditions of climate, soil, atmospheric pressure and food, were all different. The result of the change was that in every case the seemingly rigid characteristics that had been handed from parent to offspring for a thousand generations, immediately underwent a change in response to the altered life-conditions. Breathing apparatus, blood circulation, weight of furs and feathers, powers of locomotion, all began to adapt themselves to the altered physical environment.

We are glad to note that Dr. Mitchell has arrived at the same conclusion, namely, that the moulding power of environment is of greatly more importance as a factor in evolution than hereditary qualities. Whether it be true, as Professor Weismann has done much to prove, that qualities acquired by individuals are not transmitted and do not become part of the stock-capital of hereditary race-qualities, may be left on one side in the speculations of ordinary people. The point that is of importance pragmatically is that all life, including the human character, is plastic to the influence of environment. And when to this indisputable fact is added the consideration that in self creative man alone among the animal creation belongs the power to make his own environment, the gates of the future are seen to be open, the world is not a world of mechanical laws or dead facts, but a world with an open and unfinished front, a world of infinite possibilities. If, as Sir Henry Jones points out, character is internalized environment, it is no less true that environment is externalized character. And the character of a nation externalizes itself to become the moulding force of its succeeding generations, in its literature, its traditional philosophies, its moral standards, and its conceptions of the meaning and uses of life. Can there be a greater calamity to a nation than when the formative mental environment which greets each new generation as it arrives, has through some malign influence been distorted and bent backwards, been moulded on what should have been the outgrown principles of animalism or barbarism; when the light that should guide the footsteps of its rising youth has become darkness?

We, whose self-imposed mission in life it is to set up new ideals of economic justice in human relationships which shall act as a formative environment for the moulding of the character of the rising generation, must feel the pressing importance of our task more acutely than ever. There could be no reason for a nation going to war to secure itself "a place in the sun" if each member of the nation were free to use all the opportunities his own country affords for the support of his life and the promotion of his own happiness. The task before Single Taxers is to unite for the formation of a new thought-environment, a new conception of human relationships which shall be based on the idea of equal opportunity in the use of nature's bounty. We have to purify and clarify that great body of accumulated beliefs, concepts, and standards of conduct, which shall press like an atmosphere on the minds of the generation who are rapidly rising to take our places. Above all, we have to establish firmly the great truth that the earth with all its internal riches belongs equally to all the children of men, and that the skills, aptitudes and efficiencies of each belong with all their results to the individuals who own and use them. In moments of despair we may be tempted to ask with the prophet of old, "Who hath believed our report and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" but at times of clearer vision we can discern the light upon the far hills and anticipate the dawning of the day when every man shall sit under his own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid, and when in consequence "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation nor learn war any more."