< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu
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46

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

natural selection, is nowhere better seen than in his position relative to the application of natural selection to man. While one of Darwin's greatest achievements was his proximate demonstration that man is not a being wholly cut off by his origin from the rest of nature, and while he saw prophetically rather than rigorously, that the final test and goal of all science, evolutional biology with the rest, must be its ability to help man to understand and guide himself in the full scope of his nature, he did not see, at any rate clearly, what must be the inevitable outcome of trying to make struggle and selection explain fully the evolutionary process.

He failed to. see the deeper meaning of the circumstance that it must work toward making the brightness and beauty of the living world appear as though seen through a somber-colored distorting-surfaced, glass screen.

He did not see that it must foster a sort of egoism that would make the golden rule as dead on the statute books of human relationship as a mastodon in a Siberian ice-bed.[1]

The golden rule in its ethical significance does not now concern me. It is as a biological phenomenon that I am looking at it. Living organisms, and each one in its totality or so much of its totality as I can reach, are my biological data. Should I study the honey bee or the American beaver I should be adjudged an unsound biologist were I to draw sweeping conclusions about them, in which little or no cognizance should be taken of some of their most prominent traits, as for instance, of their community habits. Or still more should I be adjudged unsound were I to enter upon the study with already-fixed conceptions about instincts, let us say, that would lead me to overlook, or have to explain away, certain prominent traits.

The golden-rule trait is one that man actually presents no less surely than is the iron-rule trait. There it is, written into his history and stamped upon his behavior almost everywhere.

It is exactly the office of biology as it undertakes the study of man to frame its explanatory theories large enough to take in whatever it finds characteristic of him. If man really is a part of nature, as an unflinching evolution seems to say he is; and if natural causation really can be relied upon throughout the world, then there must be something wrong with a causal theory of evolution that not only makes no provision for, but actually negates, some of the most fundamental qualities that man's nature presents. Let us not fail to see that Huxley's trouble over the conflict between the cosmic and ethical processes involves not merely natural selection, but goes to the vitals of evolution and natural law itself. This is a mighty question.

He did not perceive that it would enable pride, avarice, cruelty and injustice to draw the sacred mantle of science about them.

Read the encyclopædias of biography from A to Z and you will find portrayed there no warmer hearted, more genuine, generous souled, open minded man than was Charles Darwin. But when you read his life for aid in understanding his work, do not fail to read the whole of

  1. ↑ My point here could hardly be misunderstood were it possible to read these statements properly set in the general discussion to which they belong.
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