Read Ebook: The Whence and the Whither of Man A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895 by Tyler John M John Mason

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INTRODUCTION

THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION

The question.--The two theories of man's origin.--The argument purely historical.--Means of tracing man's ancestry and history.--Classification.--Ontogenesis and Phylogenesis.

PROTOZOA TO WORMS: CELLS, TISSUES, AND ORGANS

Amoeba: Its anatomy and physiology.--Development of the cell.--Hydra: The development of digestive and reproductive organs, and of tissues.--Forms intermediate between amoeba and hydra: Magosphaera, volvox.--Embryonic development.--Turbellaria: Appearance of a body wall, of ganglion, and nerve-cords.

WORMS TO VERTEBRATES: SKELETON AND HEAD

Worms and the development of organs.--Mollusks: The external protective skeleton leads to degeneration or stagnation.--Annelids and arthropods: The external locomotive skeleton leads to temporary rapid advance, but fails of the goal.--Its disadvantages.--Vertebrates: The internal locomotive skeleton leads to backbone and brain.--Reasons for their dominance.--The primitive vertebrate.

VERTEBRATES: BACKBONE AND BRAIN

The advance of vertebrates from fish through amphibia and reptiles to mammals.--The development of skeleton, appendages, circulatory and respiratory systems, and brain.--Mammals: The oviparous monotremata.--Marsupials.--Placental mammals.--Development of the placenta.--Primates.--Arboreal life and the development of the hand.--Comparison of man with the highest apes.--Recapitulation of the history of man's origin and development.--The sequence of dominant functions.

THE HISTORY OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT AND ITS SEQUENCE OF FUNCTIONS

Mode of investigation.--Intellect.--Sense-perceptions.--Association. --Inference and understanding.--Rational intelligence.--Modes of mental or nervous action.--Reflex action, unconscious and comparatively mechanical.--Instinctive action: The actor is conscious, but guided by heredity.--Intelligent action.--The actor is conscious, guided by intelligence resulting from experience or observation.--The will stimulated by motives.--Appetites.--Fear and other prudential considerations.--Care for young and love of mates.--The dawn of unselfishness.--Motives furnished by the rational intelligence: Truth, right, duty.--Recapitulation: The will, stimulated by ever higher motives, is finally to be dominated by unselfishness and love of truth and righteousness.--These rouse the only inappeasable hunger, and are capable of indefinite development.--Strength of these motives.--Their complete dominance the goal of human development.

NATURAL SELECTION AND ENVIRONMENT

The reversal of the sequence of functions leads to extermination, degeneration, or, rarely, to stagnation.--Natural selection becomes more unsparing as we go higher.--Extinction.--Severity of the struggle for life.--Environment one.--But lower animals come into vital relation with but a small part of it.--It consists of a myriad of forces, which, as acting on a given form, may be considered as one grand resultant.--Environment is thus a power making at first for digestion and reproduction, then for muscular strength and activity, then for shrewdness, finally for unselfishness and righteousness.--An ultimate "power, not ourselves, making for righteousness," a personality.--Our knowledge of this personality may be valid, even though very incomplete.--Religion.--Conformity to the spiritual in or behind environment is likeness to God.--The conservative tendency in evolution.

CONFORMITY TO ENVIRONMENT

Human environment.--The development of the family as the school of man's training.--The family as the school of unselfishness and obedience.--The family as the basis of social life.--Society as an aid to conformity to environment by increasing intelligence and training conscience.--Mental and moral heredity.--Personal magnetism.--Man's search for a king.--The essence of Christianity.--Conformity to environment gives future supremacy, but often at the cost of present hardship.--Conformity as obedience to the laws of our being.--Environment best understood through the study of the human mind.--Productiveness and prospectiveness of vital capital.--Faith.

MAN

Composed of atoms and molecules, hence subject to chemical and physical laws.--As a living being.--As an animal.--As a vertebrate.--As a mammal.--As a social being.--As a personal and moral being.--The conflict between the higher and the lower in man.--As a religious being.--As hero.--He has not yet attained.--Future man.--He will utilize all his powers, duly subordinating the lower to the higher.--The triumph of the common people.

THE TEACHINGS OF THE BIBLE

PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

The struggle for existence.--Natural selection.--Correlation of organs.--Fortuitous variation.--Origin of the fittest.--N?geli's theory: Initial tendency supreme.--Weismann and the Neo-Darwinians: Natural selection omnipotent.--The Neo-Lamarckians.--Comparison of the Neo-Darwinian and the Neo-Lamarckian views.--"Individuality" the controlling power throughout the life of the organism.--Transmission of special effects of use and disuse.--Summary.

CHART SHOWING SEQUENCE OF ATTAINMENTS AND OF DOMINANT FUNCTIONS

PHYLOGENETIC CHART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

One of my friends, reading the title of these lectures, said: "Of man's origin you know nothing, of his future you know less." I fear that many share his opinion, although they might not express it so emphatically.

It would seem, therefore, to be in order to show that science is now competent to deal with this question; not that she can give a final and conclusive answer, but that we can reach results which are probably in the main correct. We may grant very cheerfully that we can attain no demonstration; the most that we can claim for our results will be a high degree of probability. If our conclusions are very probably correct, we shall do well to act according to them; for all our actions in life are suited to meet the emergencies of a probable but uncertain course of events.

We take for granted the probable truth of the theory of evolution as stated by Mr. Darwin, and that it applies to man as really as to any lower animal. At the same time it concerns our argument but little whether natural selection is "omnipotent" or of only secondary importance in evolution, as long as it is a real factor, or which theory of heredity or variation is the more probable.

If man has been evolved from simple living substance protoplasm, by a process of evolution, it will some day be possible to write a history of that process. But have we yet sufficient knowledge to justify such an attempt?

Before the history of any period can be written its events must have been accurately chronicled. Biological history can be written only when the successive stages of development and the attainments of each stage have been clearly perceived. In other words, the first prerequisite would seem to be a genealogical tree of the animal kingdom. The means of tracing this genealogical tree are given in the first chapter, and the results in the second, third, and fourth chapters of this book.

Now, for some of the ancestral stages of man's development a very high degree of probability can be claimed. One of man's earliest ancestors was almost certainly a unicellular animal. A little later he very probably passed through a gastraea stage. He traversed fish, amphibian, and reptilian grades. The oviparous monotreme and the marsupial almost certainly represent lower mammalian ancestral stages. But what kind of fish, what species of amphibian, what form of reptiles most closely resembles the old ancestor? How did each of these ancestors look? I do not know. It looks as if our ancestral tree were entirely uncertain and we were left without any foundation for history or argument.

But the history of the development of anatomical details, however important and desirable, is not the only history which can be written, nor is it essential. It would be interesting to know the size of brain, girth of chest, average stature, and the features of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But this is not the most important part of their history, nor is it essential. The great question is, What did they contribute to human progress?

Even if we cannot accurately portray the anatomical details of a single ancestral stage, can we perhaps discover what function governed its life and was the aim of its existence? Did it live to eat, or to move, or to think? If we cannot tell exactly how it looked, can we tell what it lived for and what it contributed to the evolution of man?

Now, the sequence of dominant functions or aims in life can be traced with far more ease and safety, not to say certainty, than one of anatomical details. The latter characterize small groups, genera, families, or classes; while the dominant function characterizes all animals of a given grade, even those which through degeneration have reverted to this grade.

Even if I cannot trace the exact path which leads to the mountain-top, I may almost with certainty affirm that it leads from meadow and pasture through forest to bare rock, and thence over snow and ice to the summit; for each of these forms a zone encircling the mountain. Very similarly I find that, whatever genealogical tree I adopt, one sequence in the dominance of functions characterizes them all; digestion is dominant before locomotion and locomotion before thought.

And it is hardly less than a physiological necessity that it should be so. The plant can and does exist, living almost purely for digestion and reproduction, and the same is true of the lowest and most primitive animals. A muscular system cannot develop and do its work until some sort of a digestive system has arisen to furnish nutriment, any more than a steam-engine can run without fuel. And a brain is of no use until muscle and sense-organs have appeared.

If we can be satisfied that ever higher functions have risen to dominance in the successive stages of animal and human development, if we can further be convinced that the sequence is irreversible, we shall be convinced that future man will be more and more completely controlled by the very highest powers or aims to which this sequence points. Otherwise we must disbelieve the continuity of history. But the germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the present. Hence--pardon the reiteration--if we can once trace this sequence of dominant functions, whose evolution has filled past ages, we can safely foretell something at least of man's future development.

The argument and method is therefore purely historical. Here and there we will try to find why and how things had to be so. But all such digressions are of small account compared with the fact that things were or are thus and so. And a mistaken explanation will not invalidate the facts of history.

The subject of our history is the development, not of a single human race nor of the movements of a century, but the development of animal life through ages. And even if our attempts to decipher a few pages here and there in the volumes of this vast biological history are not as successful as we could hope, we must not allow ourselves to be discouraged from future efforts. Even if our translation is here and there at fault, we must never forget the existence of the history. Some of the worst errors of biologists are due to their having forgotten that in the lower stages the germs of the higher must be present, even though invisible to any microscope. Our study of the worm is inadequate and likely to mislead us, unless we remember that a worm was the ancestor of man. And a biologist who can tell us nothing about man is neglecting his fairest field.

Conversely history and social science will rest on a firmer basis when their students recognize that many human laws and institutions are heirlooms, the attainments, or direct results of attainments, of animals far below man. We are just beginning to recognize that the study of zo?logy is an essential prerequisite to, and firm foundation for, that of history, social science, philosophy, and theology, just as really as for medicine. An adequate knowledge of any history demands more than the study of its last page. The zo?logist has been remiss in not claiming his birthright, and in this respect has sadly failed to follow the path pointed out by Mr. Darwin.

For palaeontology, zo?logy, history, social and political science, and philosophy are really only parts of one great science, of biology in the widest sense, in distinction from the narrower sense in which it is now used to include zo?logy and botany. They form an organic unity in which no one part can be adequately understood without reference to the others. You know nothing of even a constellation, if you have studied only one of its stars. Much less can the study of a single organ or function give an adequate idea of the human body.

Only when we have attained a biological history can we have any satisfactory conception of environment. As we look about us in the world, environment often seems to us to be a chaos of forces aiding or destroying good and bad, fit and unfit, alike.

But our history of animal and human progress shows us successive stages, each a little higher than the preceding, and surviving, for a time at least, because more completely conformed to environment. If this be true, and it must be true unless our theory of evolution be false, higher forms are more completely conformed to their environment than lower; and man has attained the most complete conformity of all. Our biological history is therefore a record of the results of successive efforts, each attaining a little more complete conformity than the preceding. From such a history we ought to be able to draw certain valid deductions concerning the general character and laws of our environment, to discover the direction in which its forces are urging us, and how man can more completely conform to it.

If man is a product of evolution, his mental and moral, just as really as his physical, development must be the result of such a conformity. The study of environment from this standpoint should throw some light on the validity of our moral and religious creeds and theories. It would seem, therefore, not only justifiable, but imperative to attempt such a study.

Our argument is not directly concerned with modern theories of heredity, or variation, or with the "omnipotence" or secondary importance of natural selection. And yet N?geli, and especially Weismann, have had so marked an influence on modern thought that we cannot afford to neglect their theories. We will briefly notice these in the closing chapter.

THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION

The story of a human life can be told in very few words. A youth of golden dreams and visions; a few years of struggle or of neglected opportunities; then retrospect and the end.

"We come like water, and like wind we go."

Was there ever a nation of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But Greece died of premature old age, and Rome of rottenness begotten of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to the immortal race. But if Greece and Rome and a host of older nations, of which History has often forgotten the very name, have failed and died, can anything but ultimate failure await the race? Is human history to prove a story told by an idiot, or does it "signify" something? Is the great march of humanity, which Carlyle so vividly depicts, "from the inane to the inane, or from God to God?"

This is the sphinx question put to every thinking man, and on his answer hangs his life. For according to that answer, he will either flinch and turn back, or expend every drop of blood and grain of power in urging on the march.

To this question the Bible gives a clear and emphatic answer. "God created man in his own image," and then, as if men might refuse to believe so astounding a statement, it is repeated, "in the image of God created he him." When, and by what mode or process, man was created we are not told. His origin is condensed almost into a line, his present and future occupy all the rest of the book. Whence we came is important only in so far as it teaches us humility and yet assures us that we may be Godlike because we are His handiwork and children, "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ of a heavenly inheritance."

We may say broadly that concerning the origin of species two theories, and only two, seem possible. The first theory is that every species is the result of an act of immediate creation. And every true species, however slightly it may differ from its nearest relative, represents such a creative act, and once created is practically unchangeable. This is the theory of immutability of species. According to the second theory all higher, probably all present existing, species are only mediately the result of a creative act. The first living germ, whenever and however created, was infused with power to give birth to higher species. Of these and their descendants some would continue to advance, others would degenerate. Each theory demands equally for its ultimate explanation a creative act; the second as much as, if not more than, the first. According to the first theory the creative power has been distributed over a series of acts, according to the second theory it has been concentrated in one primal creation. The second is the theory of the mutability of species, or, in general, of evolution, but not necessarily of Darwinism alone.

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