A STUDY IN BIOLOGY, ETHICS, AND ART BY T. W. ROLLESTON “Il faudrait, en un mot, suivre la grande route si profondément creusée ... mais il serait nécessaire aussi de tracer en l’air un chemin parallele, une autre route, d’atteindre les en deça et les après, de faire, en un mot, un naturalisme spiritualiste; ce serait autrement fier, autrement complet, autrement fort.” J. K. Huysmans. LONDON DUCKWORTH & CO. 3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1908...

I N a recent work by an eminent man of science, Dr. J. Reinke, Professor of Botany at the University of Kiel, there occurs a passage which I cannot do better than place in the forefront of this book as an indication of its aim. “Physiology,” writes Professor Reinke, “has become the study of the movements which, taken together, make up life. There is no manner of doubt that nourishment, metabolism, 1 reproduction, development, and sensation rest on processes of movement which depend on material s

THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN “The wisdom of the divine rule is apparent not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world.”— Lord Acton. P ALEY’S Natural Theology though not by any means an epoch-making may perhaps be called an epoch-marking book. It was the crown of the endeavour of eighteenth-century religious philosophy to found a theology on the evidences of external nature. According to such exact knowledge of Nature’s operations as was then generally available, Paley’s attempt might we

THE WHEEL OF LIFE I T has long been known that no definite line of demarcation can be drawn between the animal and the vegetable worlds. There are lowly organisms which cannot be decisively referred either to the one or to the other. It has been more recently shown that the apparently more strongly marked line between the living and the non-living also grows wavering and indistinct in places. Metals are known to respond to stimuli and to show ‘fatigue’ in a manner commonly attributed only to the

DE MINIMIS There are two functions of organic life which are often confused together, but which it is well to keep distinct in our thought. These are Growth and Development. The mark of growth is that an organism, by assimilation from the outside world, becomes larger than it was . But in development it becomes different from what it was . The history of an embryo in the womb presents a succession of phenomena which, when one comes to realize them, almost stagger thought; for, while remaining th

THE MECHANICAL THEORY OF EVOLUTION: THE DARWIN-LAMARCK EXPLANATION “Quelle est donc cette nature sujette à être effacée? La coutume est une seconde nature qui detruit la première. Pourquoi la coutume n’est elle pas naturelle? J’ai bien peur que cette nature ne soit elle-même qu’une première coutume, comme la coutume est une seconde nature.”— Pascal. W E now approach the arcana of Evolution. The processes we have to deal with in this chapter are not, and probably never will be, the subjects of di

THE MECHANICAL THEORY OF EVOLUTION: THE DARWIN-WEISMANN EXPLANATION “Chance guides all things: mind and forethought must call it God alone!”— Menander. “ I N the end,” writes M. Edmond Perrier, “every imaginable theory of evolution must lead up to one or other of two absolute doctrines, essentially antagonistic to each other. Either the inheritance of acquired characteristics must be admitted in its full scope ( dans toute sa généralité ), or else we must believe in the predestination of protopl

THE DIRECTIVE THEORY OF EVOLUTION “Who is there that cannot distinguish between the actual cause of a thing and that without which the cause could never be a cause?”—Plato, Phædo . The problem set at the close of our first chapter was to find a fit explanation of the guiding power apparent in natural phenomena. We have not been able to interpret this guiding power either in terms of conscious, intelligent contrivance or in terms of blind, mechanical law. The investigations which followed have le

LAW, FREE WILL, PERSONALITY T HERE is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, a question lying at the root of all ethics, a question which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion.” 125 This is “the question of late much agitated, Is life worth living?” 126 I confess that this question does not seem to me at all a radical or pressing one in comparison with another of which Mr. Spencer, in his Data of Ethics , takes no account whatever—the question whether we h

THE ETHICAL CRITERION “Things have life—God is life.”— Spinoza. “I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”— Rabbi Bar-elahin. T HE view of the meaning and purpose of cosmic development set forth in the preceding chapters must clearly have a bearing on the principles of human conduct. Men above a certain stage of culture do not live by blind instinct. They endeavour to harmonize their lives with some conception of the ratio essendi of the world in which they f

THE ETHICAL SANCTION Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified; in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life

ART AND LIFE “Like a living thing, one and whole.”— Aristotle. 163 T HE third chapter of Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? contains a summary of the opinions of some sixty modern writers (taken chiefly from Schasler’s Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik ) on the essential meaning of the terms Art and Beauty. All these opinions, after having been duly paraded across the stage, are dismissed by Tolstoy as a mass of “enchanted confusion and contradictoriness,” and he then proceeds to build up his own the

SUM ERGO COGITO N OT to encumber the text with too much abstruse metaphysics, I place here what seem to me some important corollaries of the position stated at the close of Chapter I. If the Universe is not a mere aggregate but a coherent Whole, then it follows of necessity that the units which compose it will have relations not only with each other but also with the Whole. When any of these units reaches the stage of consciousness it may be expected that it will become conscious of these relati

CO-OPERATION AND COMPETITION I N Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution , it seems to me (for all that it finds little favour with some men of science) that real light has been thrown on certain principles of cardinal importance which had been obscured in the too exclusive contemplation of the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life. Ample proof is given by Kropotkin of the truth of the following passage:— “As soon as we study animals—not in laboratorie

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? T HIS grave question is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, one which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion” ( Data of Ethics , § 9). He goes on to restate it in the form: Does life yield “a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling?” and he argues that “goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or hinder life only on this supposition” (§ 10). But can one really strike a balance between pleasures and

ST. FRANCIS THE POET N O one can read St. Francis’s one poem, the Canticle of the Sun , without feeling that had poetry claimed and won him in time, his might have been one of the greatest and sweetest of Italian voices. The story of its composition has a touching beauty. Towards the end of his life, when in the deepest dejection over the failure of his Order to live the life of joyful humility, unworldliness, and poverty to which he had pledged it, he came, blind and ill, to S. Clare’s Convent

ISABELLA AND CLAUDIO T HE ethics of sex-relations has always formed a crucial question in ethical systems. Let me recall a remarkable debate upon it which took place recently between a champion of the Spencerian system, Dr. Saleeby, and Mr. W. S. Lilly, who represented, of course, the view of Catholic orthodoxy. Mr. Lilly, in an article on Shakespere’s Religion contributed to the Fortnightly Review for June, 1904, was led to dwell on “the strikingly Catholic ethos of the play Measure for Measure