Frederic W. H. Myers

“ Here, then, especially might Lucretius have hailed Darwin as a liberator of mankind. For on the theory of descent, our sense of sin is a sense of relation, not to a higher power, but to our own remote and savage progenitors. If I commit a selfish or violent act, this is because the impulse to immediate enjoyment, or to self-defence, which I inherit from half-human ancestors, is temporarily stronger than the impulse to self-control or to forgiveness, which my more recent ancestors have slowly acquired and imperfectly transmitted. ”

“ For even here a doubt steals in, a doubt at which one smiles at first, as Mill learnt to smile at his (quite reasonable) fear that musical combinations would in time be exhausted, but which recurs irresistibly so soon as we try to give distinctness to the popular or optimist view of the future of science. It is taken for granted in popular writings that the present rush of scientific progress is to go on indefinitely; that in proportion as the skill and energy devoted to research increase, the discoveries made will be ever more numerous and exciting. ”

“ Vast as is the visible universe, infinite as may have been the intelligence which went to its evolution, yet, while viewed in the external way in which alone we can view it, while seen as a product and not as a plan, it cannot possibly suggest to us an indefinite number of universal laws. Such cosmic generalizations as gravitation, evolution, correlation of forces, conservation of energy, though assuredly as yet unexhausted, cannot in the nature of things be even approximately inexhaustible. ”

“ Yet, surely, if we are to talk about the soul at all, we dare not altogether decline to search for some conceivable hypothesis of its origination. Is traducianism conceivable? Can we give any meaning to the notion of direct psychical progeniture from father to son? Are we not driven back on some form of transmigrationism? some notion at least so far parallel with evolutionary theory as to allow us to think of the soul as in some way pre-existent — as having in some way undergone a progressive development analogous to the hereditary development which has made our bodies what they are? ”

“ On the whole, therefore, in reviewing Darwin’s life, we find neither any prejudice which warps his reception of evidence of any kind, nor any emotional pre-occupation which interferes with steady and fruitful labor upon the facts before him. In the old phrase of Sir T. Browne, he swims smoothly in the stream of his nature, and lives but one man. ”

“ My sin, then, so far as it went, was a case of reversion, of arrested development; it does not justify “desperation,” or suggest the infinite anger of offended Deity. Yet, on the other hand, in losing the sense of divine offence we lose the sense of divine aid, of divine forgiveness. If we feel that there is no access by which spiritual strength may be borne upon the soul, and if we are. ”

“ For she inspired him with a majestic conception; she set him on the track of truths so great and new that they seemed to fill the whole horizon, and transfigured life with their glow. Our knowledge is a hundredfold greater than his. ”

“ As it has here been told, the life unfolds itself like a pure process of growth and fruitage, and needs defence or eulogy no more than a tree or a flower.
Besides the picture of Darwin’s private life and the mass of letters illustrative of the development of his ideas, the book contains a few pages which briefly answer the question which many have wished to ask, namely, what was Darwin’s own view of the light thrown by the evolution theory and by his own work therein upon the old problems of the soul and Providence, the intimate nature and the ultimate destiny of man. ”

“ For we know at last that nothing which we shall ever discover can be to us of any true concern. What profit, if we are to gaze upon the cosmos forever from outside? to pass and leave the giant forces playing, with a purport (if any purport) which is forever hid from men? ”

“ We begin to feel that the sensitiveness of the retina, the percipient power of the brain, however supplemented by sensitive apparatus, must always be inadequate to the more delicate tasks which we would fain assign to them; and in short that the human body, developed for quite other purposes, must always be a rude and clumsy instrument for the apprehension of abstract truth. ”

“ Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. ”

“ If we, too, are to live contented with scientific progress, this means that most of us must find our happiness in the mere contemplation of the work of others, that the exhilarating sense of men’s ever-widening outlook must compensate the paltriness of our individual lots. ”

“ Man’s history, in short, is as yet in its first chapter, and science has lived as yet but a moment in the brief history of man; yet already, and, so to say, with the first glance out of our prison-windows, we have seen enough to make it tolerably certain that after a few more centuries the number of first-rate discoveries must constantly lessen, while the number of men equipped and eager for discovery will constantly increase. ”

“ Shall we suppose, then, that in the sight of some higher power our battles in this small world are not, after all, very tremendous, and that we are all the better for being left to fight them out by ourselves? ”

“ Again, while he is quite ready to publish unpopular opinions, if candor requires it (as in the case of “The Descent of Man “) , his agnosticism is far too modest and gentle-hearted to allow him to feel the mere joy of combat, the impulse which makes a man willing to admit that he knows nothing himself for the pleasure of proving to men who think they know more, that they know, in fact, if possible, less. ”

“ In the first place, if we are compelled to recognize our ancestors as lower beings than ourselves, the tradition of antiquity becomes, so to say, worse than nothing; and in the second place, however greatly we may have advanced upon our ancestors, if nevertheless all our beliefs and emotions have been derived from theirs by slow continuous development, we cannot well have acquired a new and direct knowledge as to a matter to which our senses bear no evidence. ”

“ The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. Here, surely, is the solution of the problem. The faculties of observation and reasoning were stimulated to the utmost; the domestic affections were kept keen and strong; but the atrophy of the religious instincts, of which we have already spoken, extended yet farther — over the whole range of æsthetic emotion, of mystic sentiment — over all in us which “looks before and after, and pines for what is not.” ”

“ It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become color-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence. ”

“ With respect to immortality, nothing shows me so clearly how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely, that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun, and thus gives it fresh life. ”

“ Ignorant and prejudiced critics are the only villains in the tale, and even their howling comes to us faint as the wolfish sounds which Æneas heard across the waters as he steered safe by Circe’s isle. ”

“ The evolution theory, however, almost compels us to make our notions on this point in some way definite, if we are to attribute more weight to the religious instincts of saints and sages than to “the convictions of a monkey’s mind.”
(2) Our next topic is the change which the evolution theory — especially as expounded in chapter iii. of “The Descent of Man” — has introduced into our conception of sin. In the old view, the sense of sin involved a sense of relationship with a Power above ourselves whom we had offended, but who might also forgive us. ”

“ Admitting that the visible universe is, in relation to our present faculties, practically infinite, it by no means follows that our means of scrutinizing it are capable of indefinite improvement. And in fact we find the true pioneers of science greatly more cautious in their prognostic. ”

“ Just as it is impossible to suppose that our bodies, with their rudimentary organs and their embryonic history, can be the results of a single creative impulse, even of a single creative impulse communicated to the race to which they belong, so also is it impossible to suppose that the similarly complex, similarly imperfect psychical element in us, if veritably separable from the corporeal, can be the result of one isolated creative impulse, given at some definite moment for each individual. ”

“ And although Darwin himself suggests that his intellectual or moral nature may thus have been injured, we may perhaps, on the agnostic hypothesis, more truly say that his intellect was thus fruitfully constrained and his moral nature saved from shock and storm; nay, we may go on to argue that for all of us such limitation would be best, and that the poets should be crowned with flowers and led out forever from the agnostic city ”

“ Those thinkers who have assumed that man possesses a soul, in the sense of some individualized vital principle surviving the death of the body, have naturally speculated as to the soul’s origin, and the mode in which it joins connection with the body. Creationists have supposed that a soul was created by a fresh act of God for each new body. ”

“ Passing from these problems drawn from our actual earthly descent to the realm of philosophical, or perhaps I should rather say theological, speculation, it seems worth observing that the whole evolution theory, and Darwin’s work in particular, has given to one among several theories of the genesis of the soul a certain analogical advantage over its ancient rivals. ”

“ Then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? ... Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? ”

“ This last speculation, though showing to what distant fields of thought the influence of the evolution theory extends, is, I need hardly say, nowhere noticed by Darwin himself. Absolutely open to every kind of definite evidence, his mind refuses to dwell for long on shadowy possibilities. ”

“ Once more; it is characteristic of Darwin’s sobriety of mind that, although he does not pretend personally to regret old faiths, he does not throw the slightest optimistic coloring around his novel conceptions. A tone of triumph comes readily to a man who feels that he is upsetting error and preaching truth ”

“ Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. ”

“ But we must remember that Professor Huxley’s trenchant polemic has cast a kind of glory about the mere fact of man’s ignorance which cannot possibly be kept up for long. Battles there will always be; but never again, perhaps, such a plunging through half-armed foemen, such an ύριοτεία of the agnostic as we associate with that brilliant name. ”

“ He seems, as already said, to be the exemplar of a new ideal, a man as well adapted to human life, on the hypothesis that this earth is all that we can know, as a John or a Paul were adapted to human life on the hypothesis that our citizenship is in heaven. ”

“ And it was significant also of the continuity between the two ideals, of the fact that virtue and duty are in essentials the same to the man who treats this life as all as to the man “begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” For the personal character of the great innovator largely influenced the reception of his teaching by the mass of mankind. ”

“ In this respect their various theoretical opinions seem to make little difference; but we soon feel that it is not from a chosen company of men such as these that we can argue as to the ultimate influence of any belief or disbelief upon the mass of mankind. ”

“ Why better than the very worst?” the gathering hand of pessimists call from every side; and Darwin [I. 309] goes perhaps as far as wary science will allow, when he points out that the mere influence of natural selection guarantees a certain amount of happiness in the races that survive, inasmuch as “if all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree they would neglect to propagate their kind ”