John Fiske

“ The blades of waving grass, the fluttering leaves upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare fascination; for the green stuff that fills their cellular tissues, and the tissues of all green things that grow, is the world's great inimitable worker of wonders; its marvellous alchemy takes dead matter and breathes into it the breath of life. But for that magician chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, such things as animal life and conscious intelligence would be impossible; there would be no problems of creation, nor philosopher to speculate upon them. ”

“ Thus by gradual stages we have passed from four-footed existence into Human Society, and once more I would emphasize the fact that nowhere do we find any breach of continuity, but one factor sets another in operation, which in turn reacts upon the first, and so on in a marvellously harmonious consensus. Surely if there is anywhere in the universe a story matchless for its romantic interest, it is the story of the genesis of Man, now that we are at length beginning to be able to decipher it. We see that there is a good deal more in it than mere natural selection. ”

“ It is but the utterance of an old-world feeling, natural enough to hard-pressed and sorely tried humanity in those moments that have come to it only too often, when triumphant wrong is dreadfully real and close at hand, while anything like compensation seems shadowy and doubtful and far away.
It is this feeling that has created the belief in a devil, an adversary to the good God, an adversary hard to conquer or baffle. The feeling underlies every theological creed, and in every system of philosophy we find it lurking somewhere. ”

“ When we speak of Intelligence and Will and Personality, we must use these words with the meanings in which experience has clothed them, or we shall soon find ourselves talking nonsense. The only intelligence we know is strictly serial in its nature, and is limited by the existence of independent objects of cognition. What flight of analogy can bear us across the gulf that divides such finite intelligence from that unlimited Knowledge to which all things past and future are ever present? Volition, as we know it, implies alternative courses of action, antecedent motives, and resulting effort. ”

“ This is no ghostly universe, but all intensely real as it exists in that intensest of realities, the human soul! Consciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is the most fundamental of facts. But a truly marvellous affair is consciousness! The most general truth that we can assert with regard to it is this, that it exists only by virtue of incessant change. A state of consciousness that should continue through an appreciable interval of time without undergoing change would not be a state of consciousness. ”

“ The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion. ”

“ What would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and women an Eden would be but a fool's paradise. ”

“ I say, then, that when a creature's intelligence is low, and its experience very meagre, consisting of a few simple perceptions and acts that occur throughout life with monotonous regularity, all the registration of this experience gets effected in the nerve-centres of its offspring before birth, and they come into the world fully equipped for the battle of life, like the snapping turtle, which snaps with decisive vigour as soon as it emerges from the egg. Nothing is left plastic to be finished after birth, and so the life of each generation is almost an exact repetition of its predecessor. ”

“ Though the history of our lives, and of all life upon our planet, as written down by the unswerving finger of Nature, may exhibit all events and their final purpose in unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited vision the several fragments of the record, like the leaves of the Cumæan sibyl, caught by the fitful breezes of circumstance and whirled wantonly hither and thither, lie in such intricate confusion that no ingenuity can enable us wholly to decipher the legend. ”

“ I say, then, that mankind have framed, and for long ages maintained, a notion of God into which there enters a human element. Now if it should ever be possible to abolish that human element, it would not be possible to cheat mankind into accepting the non-human remnant of the notion as an equivalent of the full notion of which they had been deprived. Take away from our symbolic conception of God the human element, and that aspect of theism which has from the outset chiefly interested mankind is gone. ”

“ Along with the rise from gregariousness to incipient sociality, along with the first stammerings of articulate speech, along with the dawning discrimination between right and wrong, came the earliest feeble groping toward a world beyond that which greets the senses, the first dim recognition of the Spiritual Power that is revealed in and through the visible and palpable realm of nature. And universally since that time the notion of Ethics has been inseparably associated with the notion of Religion, and the sanction for Ethics has been held to be closely related with the world beyond phenomena. ”

“ When we have once thoroughly grasped the monotheistic conception of the universe as an organic whole, animated by the omnipresent spirit of God, we have forever taken leave of that materialism to which the universe was merely an endless multitude of phenomena. ”

“ The life of its countless tiny denizens is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by the way, of starvation from hunger and cold, of robbery utterly shameless and murder utterly cruel. That green sward in taking possession of its territory has exterminated scores of flowering plants of the sort that human economics and æsthetics stigmatize as weeds; nor do the blades of the victorious army dwell side by side in amity, but in their eagerness to dally with the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant one another without the smallest compunction. ”

“ In these dark regions of thought, which science has such scanty means for exploring, the statements which make up a creed are apt to be the outgrowth of such an all-pervading sentiment, while their form will be found to vary with the knowledge of nature—meagre enough at all times, and even in our boasted time—which happens to characterize the age in which they are made. ”

“ As a matter of history, the existence of a quasi-human God has always been an assumption or postulate. It is something which men have all along taken for granted. It probably never occurred to anybody to try to prove the existence of such a God until it was doubted, and doubts on that subject are very modern. Omitting from the account a few score of ingenious philosophers, it may be said that all mankind, the wisest and the simplest, have taken for granted the existence of a Deity, or deities, of a psychical nature more or less similar to that of Humanity. ”

“ The whole universe is animated by a single principle of life, and whatever we see in it, whether to our half-trained understanding and narrow experience it may seem to be good or bad, is an indispensable part of the stupendous scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, in one of those characteristic flashes of insight into the heart of things in which no one has ever excelled him, in nature there is nothing that is out of place or interpolated, as in an ill-constructed drama. ”

“ None can deny that it is the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of mankind upon the earth.
Now if the relation thus established in the morning twilight of Man's existence between the Human Soul and a world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective term is non-existent, then, I say, it is something utterly without precedent in the whole history of creation. All the analogies of Evolution, so far as we have yet been able to decipher it, are overwhelming against any such supposition. ”

“ It is not strange that when biologists speak of evolution they should often or usually have in mind simply the modifications wrought in plants and animals by means of natural selection. For it was by calling attention to such modifications that Darwin discovered a true cause of the origin of species by physiological descent from allied species. Thus was demonstrated the fact of evolution in its most important province; men of science were convinced that the higher forms of life are derived from lower forms, and the old notion of special creations was exploded once and forever. ”

“ If on the one hand it is impossible for the finite Mind to fathom the Infinite, on the other hand it is practically misleading to apply the term Unknowable to the Deity that is revealed in every pulsation of the wondrously rich and beautiful life of the Universe. ”

“ We should have been the denizens of a world of puppets, where neither morality nor religion could have found place or meaning. The mystery of evil remains a mystery still, but it is no longer a harsh dissonance such as greeted the poet's ear when the doors of hell were thrown open; for we see that this mystery belongs among the profound harmonies in God's creation. This reflection may have in it something that is consoling as we look forth upon the ills of the world. Many are the pains of life, and the struggle with wickedness is hard ”

“ Our common-sense argument puts the scientific presumption entirely and decisively on the side of religion and against all atheistic and materialistic explanations of the universe. It establishes harmony between our highest knowledge and our highest aspirations by showing that the latter no less than the former are a normal result of the universal cosmic process. It has nothing to fear from the advance of scientific discovery, for as these things come to be better understood, it is going to be realized that the days of the antagonism between Science and Religion must by and by come to an end. ”

“ For most persons no amount of explanation will prevent the use of the word Unknowable from seeming to remove Deity to an unapproachable distance, whereas the Deity revealed in the process of evolution is the ever-present God without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and whose voice is heard in each whisper of conscience, even while his splendour dwells in the white ray from yonder star that began its earthward flight while Abraham's shepherds watched their flocks. ”

“ Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process
But as we look still further into the matter, our mood is changed once more. We find that this hideous hatred and strife, this wholesale famine and death, furnish the indispensable conditions for the evolution of higher and higher types of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless destruction of all individuals that fall short of a certain degree of fitness to the circumstances of life into which they are born, the type would inevitably degenerate, the life would become lower and meaner in kind. ”

“ A world of completed happiness might well be a world of quiescence, of stagnation, of automatism, of blankness; the dynamics of evolution would have no place in it. But suppose we say that the ultimate goal of the ethical process is the perfecting of human character? This form of statement contains far more than the other. Consummation of happiness is a natural outcome of the perfecting of character, but that perfecting can be achieved only through struggle, through discipline, through resistance. It is for him that overcometh that the crown of life is reserved. ”

“ When one has sufficiently recovered one's gravity, it is permissible to reply to such criticisms that the sharp antithesis between good and evil is essential to every step of my argument, which would entirely collapse if the antagonism were for one moment disregarded. The quantity of suffering in the world is unquestionably so great as to prompt us to do all in our power to diminish it; such we shall presently see must be the case in a world that proceeds through stages of evolution. ”

“ In a happy world there must be sorrow and pain, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is indispensable. The stern necessity for this has been proved to inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part and parcel of the universe. To him who is disposed to cavil at the world which God has in such wise created, we may fairly put the question whether the prospect of escape from its ills would ever induce him to put off this human consciousness, and accept in exchange some form of existence unknown and inconceivable! ”

“ So as we look back over the marvellous life-history of our planet, even from the dull time when there was no life more exalted than that of conferva scum on the surface of a pool, through ages innumerable until the present time when Man is learning how to decipher Nature's secrets, we look back over an infinitely slow series of minute adjustments, gradually and laboriously increasing the points of contact between the inner Life and the World environing. Step by step in the upward advance toward Humanity the environment has enlarged. ”