CONTENTS

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        The Philosophy of Language[1].

        4/ Darwin and Max Muller.
        The idea of cosmic evolution, in my opinion the greatest conception ever formed by the human intellect, is at the present day stirring and agitating the minds of all. The name of Darwin suggests the idea of mighty opposing forces, and the passionate controversy which inflames the minds of men spreads from the sphere of science down to the regions of daily talk, and is fought out in a gigantic ever-growing mass of popular literature. Just as formerly there used to be no department of science that did not at some point of other come in collision with religious tradition and ecclesiastical orthodoxy, so that a clear understanding with and emancipation from these powers became the first condition of life and action to the awakening sciences, so at the present day there is no department of human knowledge but is compelled to bring its own supreme and ultimate problems into relation with the idea of evolution ; nay, even to regard itself as a mere branch of the great tree whose roots are lost in the immeasurable past, while its topmost shoots reach into the broad bright space of heaven, and its blossoms give gay promise of the fruit that is to ripen for later generations. This mighty tree is the science of Man.
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It is only by the study of its own past that the human mind is enabled to solve the great riddle, and attain a clearer understanding of itself and its place in the universe, and at the same time to acquire a guiding star, a compass in the dark kingdom of futurity, which will preserve it from the vain wanderings and useless expenditure of force so frequent and fatal in the past. With a clear consciousness of the aim and a firmer grasp of the means, the future development of the human race will leave all previous attainments far behind. Indeed, it is hardly too much to affirm that the course of a few more centuries will enable our race to look back upon this enlightened, cultivated and refined nineteenth century of ours as a period of barbarism and ignorance.
        The idea of development, as has often been remarked, is by no means a novel one. Its germs may be traced back to that chosen people whose enlightened glance first sought to trace the presiding influence of reason in creation, back to the earliest Greek philosophers ; among whom notably the deep-souled Herakleitos, 'the Obscure/ conceived the world as an eternal Becoming, with upward striving and downward fall (this is how I understand ἡ ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) : 2,400 years before Schopenhauer and Darwin, he proclaimed their most characteristic doctrine in their own words: Ἡράκλειτος μὲν γὰρ ἀντικρὺς πόλεμον ὀνομάζει πατέρα και βασιλέα καί κύριον πάντων. Hate and strife lead to generation, all being proceeds from discord, the struggle for existence rules the world and is its vital principle; the ἐκπύρωσις, or reconversion into the primitive element of fire, alone promises concord and peace, like the 'negation of the will' or the Nirvana of
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Schopenhauer and the Buddhists. Like Schopenhauer and Darwin, he failed to recognise the presence, beside and above the hatred which breeds divisions and strife, of the other great universal principle, almighty Love, source of each new perfection, uniting and combining all things, suffering and enduring, pardoning and atoning, devoting and sacrificing all—even life itself.
        In the classical literature of Germany, the idea of development presents itself from time to time with more or less clearness and conscious precision. In his lectures upon empirical anthropology Kant did not hesitate to assume as self-evident the descent of man from beings of inferior grade, i.e. from the lower animals. The mind of Lessing, impregnated as it was with the ideas of Spinoza, could not possibly pursue any course which was inconsistent with the education of the human race, by natural means and forces, into steadily developing enlightenment and independence. Herder's 'Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’ are simply a sketch of the development of the human race towards a gradually progressive perfection. He, too, bestows penetrating and, so far as the then state of empirical science allowed, comparative consideration upon the physical difference between man and animals, though he lays much more stress — and in this many modern Darwinians might take a lesson from him — upon the inner principle, the mental development, which is after all the chief thing, though, strange to say, it is almost entirely ignored, or only incidentally mentioned, by the modern school of evolutionists.
        The question has been vigorously debated, whether Goethe can be claimed as a supporter of the Darwinian theory of descent, whether he is to be quoted, as by
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Haeckel, as one of the founders of the doctrine, or regarded, on the contrary, as an adherent of the theory of types. I must confess the controversy seems to me an idle one. The juvenile enthusiasm which took possession of the octogenarian poet when he heard how the French Academy had listened with lively sympathy and interest to the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, while the political storms of the July Revolution were raging outside their walls, this very enthusiasm itself shows that the question for him lay not merely between one scientific theory and another, but between the victory or defeat of a whole system, namely, of a view of the universe, in which mind as well as matter was allowed its place. This may sound paradoxical when Darwinism is the subject of discussion, but it will only do so to the thoughtless majority who make no distinction between materialism and monism, which are as far apart as the poles. To show that this was the case, I will quote Goethe's own significant expressions, together with Lazarus Geiger's comments upon them :[2] —

'When the July Revolution broke out, and the faithful Eckermann found his master in a lively state of excitement about the great events which were taking place in Paris, he began to talk about the errors of the fallen ministry; upon which Goethe replied:     "We don't seem to understand each other; I have nothing to say about those people, my concern is about a very different matter. I am speaking of the controversy, of such supreme scientific importance, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, which has at last broken out openly in the Academy. From henceforward, in France as elsewhere, natural science will recognise the supremacy of mind over matter; the great maxims of creation will
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reveal themselves, and we shall penetrate the mysteries of the divine laboratory. This event is incredibly precious to me, and I have a right to rejoice that I am alive to witness the victory won at last by the cause to which my life has been devoted, and which I have made peculiarly my own." The idea of which Goethe already witnessed the victory in the spirit, of which he hailed the proclamation by Geoffroy de St. Hilaire,—the idea of cosmic evolution, — will, I doubt not, do as much for the world's freedom as any other great world-historical thought of the past. For sooner or later we shall learn from it what man may expect and demand from himself, from humanity and from nature.'

        Anyone who, like Schiller, makes the specific character of mankind to consist in freedom, and like him regards liberty and authority as the two great subjects of human interest.[3] is necessarily compelled to reject the notion that the human will is guided or influenced by any superhuman, or extra-human will, however exalted, noble, and pure the conception of it may be. The fact that man is his own creator is alone able to lend value, dignity, and elevation to his being: the abundant powers which have procured him supremacy over the rest of the planet interest us alone if they are the product of his own efforts, not if they are merely cast into his lap by fortune; and in no other light can we regard any higher being to whose favour man may be assumed to owe his precedence. The true kernel and substance of universal history in Schiller's eyes was the image of the human race wrestling its way to an ever higher level of liberty, force and morality. In this sense was the sketch conceived of that Jena Inaugural address of which Carlyle has said: 'There has perhaps never been in Europe another course of
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history sketched on principles so magnificent and philosophical.' After he had carried the picture of primseval savagery back to its remotest stage, and contrasted with it the glittering image of contemporary culture, he says in conclusion:—

'What opposite pictures 1 Who would suspect the refined European of the eighteenth century of being a brother— a few more steps advanced—of the modern Canadian, or the ancient Celt. All these powers and experiences, these aesthetic impulses, these creations of reason, have been implanted and developed in man during the progress of a few centuries; all of these wonders of art, these colossal triumphs of industry, have all been educed from this beginning. What roused those to life, what lured these into being? What conditions had the human race to pass through between the two extreme points: how did man, the unsociable troglodyte, develop into the intelligent thinker, the cultivated man of the world? This is the question to which Universal History supplies the answer.'

        The few centuries of which Schiller speaks in this passage are no longer enough for the historian of mankind. Pre-historic science allows us to glance into a vast abysmal past, for which the measures of former chronology are as inadequate as a mundane foot-rule for the distances of Sirius. The further we recede into obscurity, the slower naturally we must expect to find the course of progress. There was a time when men did not know the use of fire, when they were destitute of the very simplest instruments such as we can now hardly dissever from the conception of humanity ; and yet even then man was already himself— for man had the gift of speech.
        It seems, then, that, with the exception of one short luminous period, the actual realm of human
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history is enveloped in profound obscurity: an immeasurable past, replete with riddles and mystery, for the interpretation of which only a few dumb witnesses spring from the bosom of earth, forces itself upon the mind of the enquirer as a problem only to be worked out with difficulty and by slow degrees. What then, we may well ask, is the need, where the sense of venturing rashly beyond these distant borders, and seeking to discover connecting links common to human kind with other beings (in whom the characteristic of humanity—reason—is wanting), in order that man may be brought into genealogical relationship with the latter? And yet this is the question which does most to stimulate our curiosity, and the consideration of this question—which for us is the supreme one, since it concerns the genesis of man—is not to be evaded; however often we may set it aside as presumptuous and unanswerable, so often it will present itself anew, and refuse to be silenced till the ghost of the problem is laid by its solution.
        The ideas of Lamarck and Darwin are founded upon a comparison of the innumerable organic forms which cover the surface of our globe, and possess, in spite of almost infinite variation, a kind of internal coherence or similarity of nature which it .is impossible to deny. Schiller says of the savage tribes whose customs and mode of life were brought to the knowledge of Europe by modern voyages of discovery:—

'We see nations in the most various stages of civilisation encamped around us, like children of different ages clustered round a grown-up person, who remind him by their example of what he once was himself, and of the point from which he started. A wise hand seems to have spared these tribes until
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the exact moment when our own culture has made sufficient progress to allow of our making a useful application of the discovery to ourselves, and by the help of this mirror restoring the lost beginnings of our race.'

        What Schiller here maintains to be possible and desirable within the limits of the specific notion of humanity—namely, to explain and interpret the present as a vast development of the past—is extended by Darwinism so as to include man as the last link of a much greater, almost invisibly prolonged, chain of development, of which the first link would have to be sought in the most rudimentary form of animal life, the, to all appearance, formless and structureless Amœbæ. What Schiller says of primitive, wholly uncivilised races, is applied by the theory of descent to the countless forms of the animal kingdom; these answer to the real infancy of our race, the chrysalis state, the stages which it had to pass through before it could attain to human culture and thereby to its present height of development. A brilliant Frenchman spoke of a posterite contemporaine, referring to the judgment of foreigners upon the productions of domestic literature ; and we might describe the manifold forms of animal life as an antiquite contemporaine, since Nature herself seems to have preserved in them an image of our own original embryonic state, and to have spread out before us innumerable copies of it only to encourage reflective comparison and earnest meditation on our origin.
        While acknowledging ungrudgingly the high scientific value of Darwinism, the philosophic thinker has no right to close his eyes to its foibles, its incomplete-
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ness and its one-sidedness; and it should also be expressly and emphatically distinguished from the Monistic doctrine of development.
        Praise has often, and rightly, been bestowed upon the calm caution of Darwin's proceedings, who, like a true naturalist, only began to draw his conclusions after he had collected together an imposing mass of materials, based upon observations carefully sifted and verified. And it seems to me that we.may fairly expect the gallant band of naturalists who fight under his banner to accept all the obligations imposed by their own motto, Natura non facit saltus. As it serves for the Alpha and Omega of their practical observations and theoretic inferences; as it is the tacit premise and the avowed conclusion of all their labours, it ought also to be rigidly respected in their whole procedure, and we ought not to have to complain of rash guesses by which things heretofore divided by immeasurable chasms and abysses are brought together or deduced one from the other.
        The one-sidedness of contemporary Darwinism consists mainly in its endeavour to refer everything to external causes, while internal qualities, as it seems, are ignored or undervalued.
        To take an illustration: when it is observed that white foxes are to be met with mostly in the Polar regions, the phenomenon admits of an obvious explanation upon Darwinian principles. The white colour is an example of protective mimicry; the animal escapes the pursuit of its natural enemies more easily when it is the colour of the surrounding sndw; and if we assume the same conditions to continue unchanged for a sufficient time, it is easy to imagine how foxes of
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every other colour might die out and the white alone survive. In this case external circumstances alone are considered; for the gradual protective adaptation to the conditions given is simply the result of a selection accomplished under the compulsion of these same conditions. The will, the inner disposition of the animal itself, need not be taken into consideration at all. Here, accordingly, Darwinism is within its rights, though, if we are to be perfectly candid, it must be confessed that the word used to explain the fact— that is to say, heredity—is itself an unsolved mystery, or a mere word of which the meaning is still to be sought.
        But the case is altogether different when the animal escapes from the dangers which threaten it on all sides by the development of appropriate mental qualities, to borrow human expressions, such as caution or cunning, or by the increasing delicacy of its sense-perceptions, or whatsoever else, when this development is the result of continuous practice in encountering and avoiding those dangers: for here we have to do with a conjoint physical and psychic progress, effected by the will, or individual effort, by the energetic impulse of self-assertion and self-preservation, which in the course of generations rises to astounding heights.
        Is not the first result like a gift of chance, or the lucky number of a lottery, while the latter may be compared with the wealth acquired by painful industry? Those who refer only to external, purely mechanical causes, when dealing with cases of the latter kind, have hardly understood, let alone mastered, the
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great problem of the doctrine of development, and they have certainly no right to a voice in matters of philosophy.
        The heretical assumption that mind and consciousness can be traced back to material forms, and the consequent confusion of the external and internal qualities of things, have hindered Darwinism from entering on a serious philosophic examination of its true principles and speculative premises; this want of critical reserve has made itself fatally visible in the rash inferences and thoughtless disregard of real discrepancies which characterise their attempts to compare and connect things radically heterogeneous in their nature and circumstances.
        If the whole animated world is to be derived from an organised cell, and yet the assumption only slipped in, as it were by the way, with a cavalier 'Accordez-nous seulement ce petit bout, nous en déduirons le reste’ the proceeding betrays as complete and naive ignorance of the magnitude and difficulty as well as of the real gist of the problem, as that of Sir William Thomson and his disciple HelmholtZj who would have the germs of organic life imported by meteorites from distant worlds, or that of Haeckel, who suspects carbon itself to be the actual vehicle of life: the latter, indeed, a very instructive illustration of modern myth-making—nomina-numina.
        Is it really so hard to understand the impossibility of finding the starting-point for a theory of the universe in matter, the conception of which is only the secondary element of our knowledge, while the immediate element of certainty is given by consciousness, feeling, will ?
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        It is time to recognise the truth that, when a chemist shows us how oxygen and hydrogen, acids and alkalies, rush into combination, he is only exhibiting a process which remains absolutely unintelligible to us as long as we regard it from a merely mechanical point of view, whilst it becomes plain and simple as soon as we compare it with analogous processes in ourselves, e.g. with the functions of respiration or nutrition, since the mental qualities, the feeling, impulse, or will, which we associate with those processes, are what we are best acquainted with in ourselves.
        Still more grave is the error or self-deception of the Darwinians who attempt to explain the nature of man, the eternal riddle of the Sphinx, the great mystery of the universe, partly by external, i.e. negative, causes, partly out of mere corporeal factors. 'Love's Labour's Lost’ or 'Much Ado about-Nothing’ are the comments that suggest themselves when we contemplate the ant-like industry of the anthropologists who fill the world with their appeals, and imagine themselves to be on the verge of discoveries when they have collected a few more cranial measurements or statistics about blue and black eyes, and dark or fair hair. The whole affair will be brought to an end by its own excesses, and will only serve to raise a smile when posterity looks back on the pitiful disproportion between the means employed and the result aimed at.
        Still less, however, can the gap which severs man from other animals be bridged by ingenious physiological terms, such as brachycephalous or makrocephalous, or arbitrary classifications, like homo alalus, a compound which reminds us strongly of the traditional xylosideros, or 'wooden iron,' or even by the
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observation that the bodily structure of man is not distinguished from that of beasts by any specific anatomical mark. The latter argument indeed may be used directly against the theory of Darwinism. For it is an obvious retort, that if the notorious superiority of man is unattended by any marked bodily divergence from the animal type, the superiority must have some other cause; and this brings us round directly to the assumption of some self-subsisting substance independent of the body, i.e. the human soul.
        At this point it is necessary to notice the attitude which Professor Max Müller has taken up and hitherto maintained in relation to Darwinism. All those who, with more or less skill and candor, have taken up arms against the Darwinian theory, have put the name of Max Miiller in the front rank as a crushing argument, a mighty bulwark, entrenched behind which they could discharge their own feeble shafts against the great disturber of the public peace. And in this they are not, from one point of view, much to blame, for it is my firm conviction that Max Müller is the only equal, not to say superior, antagonist, who has entered the arena against Darwin.

'There is in man a something, I am not afraid to call it for the present an occult quality, which distinguishes him from every animal without exception. We call this something reason when we think of it as an internal energy, and we call it language when we perceive and grasp it as an external phenomenon. No reason without speech, no speech without reason. Language is the Rubicon which divides man from beast, and no animal will ever cross it. I may express my conviction that the science of language will yet enable
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us to withstand the extreme theories of the Darwinians, and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute. Let the experiment be tried, and the most intelligent of apes be reared and trained among men: he will not speak, he will remain brutish; while the rudest human waif from the most savage tribe will promptly acquire from human intercourse this first characteristic of humanity.'

        With these weighty arguments our hero confronted undauntedly all the onslaughts of irate Darwinians, and concluded resolutely his defence of the seemingly abandoned fortress.

'Here is reason, here language, here humanity. None shall pass here; none penetrate into the sanctuary who cannot tell me first how reason, how speech, was born.'

        And the shouting bands of the assailants were struck dumb, for they could give no answer.