Pierre Loti - "Madame Chrysantheme, v4"

Eliza Lee Follen - "Little Songs"

Alfred de Musset - "Child of a Century, v2"

Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc) - "Jacqueline, v1"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays







THE ASCENT OF MAN.


Science and criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and
revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being
created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all
probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a
series of intermediate forms.

The discovery is, of course, unspeakably momentous. Among other things
it seems to open to us a new view of morality, and one which, if it is
verified by further investigation, can hardly fail to produce a great
change in philosophy. Supposing that man has ascended from a lower
animal form, there appears to be ground at least for surmising that
vice, instead of being a diabolical inspiration or a mysterious element
of human nature, is the remnant of the lower animal not yet eliminated;
while virtue is the effort, individual and collective, by which that
remnant is being gradually worked off. The acknowledged connection of
virtue with the ascendency of the social over the selfish desires and
tendencies seems to correspond with this view; the nature of the lower
animals being, so far as we can see, almost entirely selfish, and
admitting no regard even for the present interests of their kind, much
less for its interests in the future. The doubtful qualities, and "last
infirmities of noble minds," such as ambition and the love of fame, in
which the selfish element is mingled with one not wholly selfish, and
which commend themselves at least by their refinement, as contrasted
with the coarseness of the merely animal vices, may perhaps be regarded
as belonging to the class of phenomena quaintly designated by some
writers as "pointer facts," and as marking the process of transition. In
what morality consists, no one has yet succeeded in making clear. Mr.
Sidgwick's recent criticism of the various theories leads to the
conviction that not one of them affords a satisfactory basis for a
practical system of ethics. If our lower nature can be traced to an
animal origin, and can be shown to be in course of elimination, however
slow and interrupted, this at all events will be a solid fact, and one
which must be the starting-point of any future system of ethics. Light
would be at once thrown by such a discovery on some parts of the subject
which have hitherto been involved in impenetrable darkness. Of the vice
of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been
given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no
human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from
animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part
explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral
phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear;
individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the
difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to
comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the
love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the
contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified,
while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science
of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral
disease.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine
of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which
it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of
institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost
rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard
to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical
nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make
anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human
actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a
physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new
knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter
passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent
heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel
transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a
philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter,"
and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was
before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar
social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of
mechanical or physiological terms.

We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may
explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of
the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed,
are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it
could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at
variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it
might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely
mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat
against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can
apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that
which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an
archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of
human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact,
constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe
in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not
merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and
consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from
the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct
of a man.

Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is,
and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet
it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too
much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of
thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have
somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical
origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds
compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our
eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing
sight of the _Ascent_ of man?

There seems in the first place, to be a tendency to treat the origin of
a being as finally decisive of its nature and destiny. From the language
sometimes used, we should almost suppose that rudiments alone were real,
and that all the rest was mere illusion. An eminent writer on the
antiquities of jurisprudence intimates his belief that the idea of human
brotherhood is not coeval with the race, and that primitive communities
were governed by sentiments of a very different kind. His words are at
once pounced upon as a warrant for dismissing the idea of human
brotherhood from our minds, and substituting for it some other social
principles, the character of which has not yet been definitely
explained, though it is beginning in some quarters pretty distinctly to
appear. But surely this is not reasonable. There can be no reason why
the first estate of man, which all allow to have been his lowest estate,
should claim the prerogative of furnishing his only real and
indefeasible principles of action. Granting that the idea of human
brotherhood was not aboriginal--granting that it came into the world at
a comparatively late period, still it has come, and having come, it is
as real and seems as much entitled to consideration as inter-tribal
hostility and domestic despotism were in their own day. That its advent
has not been unattended by illusions and aberrations is a fact which
does not cancel its title to real existence under the present
conditions, and with the present lights of society, any more than in
annuls the great effects upon the actions of men and the course of
history which the idea has undeniably produced. Human brotherhood was
not a part of a primaeval revelation; it may not have been an original
institution; but it seems to be a real part of a development, and it may
be a part of a plan. That the social principles of certain anti-
philanthropic works are identical with those which governed the actions
of mankind in a primaeval and rudimentary state, when man had only just
emerged from the animal, and have been since worked off by the foremost
races in the course of development, is surely rather an argument against
the paramount and indefeasible authority of those principles than in
favour of it. It tends rather to show that their real character is that
of a relapse, or, as the physiologists call it, a reversion. When there
is a vast increase of wealth, of sensual enjoyment, and of the
selfishness which is apt to attend them, it is not marvellous that such
reversions should occur.

Another eminent writer appears to think that he has put an end to
metaphysical theology, and perhaps to metaphysics and theology
altogether, by showing that "being," and the cognate words, originally
denoted merely physical perceptions. But so, probably, did all language.
So did "spirit," so did "geist," so did "power," so did even "sweet
reasonableness," and "the not us which makes for righteousness." Other
perceptions or ideas have gradually come, and are now denoted by the
words which at first denoted physical perceptions only. Why have not
these last comers as good a claim to existence as the first? Suppose the
intellectual nature of man has unfolded, and been brought, as it
conceivably may, into relations with something in the universe beyond
the mere indications of the five bodily senses--why are we bound to
mistrust the results of this unfolding? We might go still further back,
and still lower, than to language denoting merely physical perceptions.
We might go back to inarticulate sounds and signs; but this does not
invalidate the reality of the perceptions afterwards expressed in
articulate language. It seems not very easy to distinguish, in point of
trustworthiness of source, between the principles of metaphysics and the
first principles of mathematics, or to say, if we accept the deductions
in one case, why we should not accept them in the other. It is
conceivable at least, we venture to repeat, that the development of
man's intellectual nature may have enabled him to perceive other things
than those which he perceives by means of his five bodily senses; and
metaphysics, once non-existent, may thus have come into legitimate
existence. Man, if the doctrine of evolution is true, was once a
creature with only bodily senses; nay, at a still earlier stage, he was
matter devoid even of bodily sense; now he has arrived--through the
exercise of his bodily senses it may be--at something beyond bodily
sense, at such notions as _being, essence, existence_: he reasons
upon these notions, and extends the scope of his once merely physical
vocabulary so as to comprehend them. Why should he not? If we are to be
anchored hard and fast to the signification of primaeval language, how
are we to obtain an intellectual basis for "the not us which makes for
righteousness?" Do not the anti-metaphysicists themselves unconsciously
metaphysicize? Does not their fundamental assumption--that the knowledge
received through our bodily senses alone is trustworthy--involve an
appeal to a mental necessity as much as anything in metaphysics, whether
the mental necessity in this case be real or not?

Again, the great author of the Evolution theory himself, in his
_Descent of Man_, has given us an account of morality which
suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the
conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication
of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions.
Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced
to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette
which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles
to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating
as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of
moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self-
sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life with its hopes and
aspirations, its prayers and fanes. Such an account even of the origin
of morality seems rather difficult to receive. Surely, even in their
most rudimentary condition, virtue and vice must have been distinguished
by some other characteristic than the relative permanency of two
different sets of impressions. There is a tendency, we may venture to
observe, on the part of eminent physicists, when they have carefully
investigated and explained what seems to them the most important and
substantial subjects of inquiry, to proffer less careful explanations of
matters which to them seem secondary and less substantial, though
possibly to an intelligence surveying the drama of the world from
without the distinctly human portion of it might appear more important
than the rest. Eminent physicists have been known, we believe, to
account summarily for religion as a surviving reminiscence of the
serpent which attacked the ancestral ape and the tree which sheltered
him from the attack, so that Newton's religious belief would be a
concomitant of his remaining trace of a tail. It was assumed that
primaeval religion was universally the worship of the serpent and of the
tree. This assumption was far from being correct; but, even if it had
been correct, the theory based on it would surely have been a very
summary account of the phenomena of religious life.

However, supposing the account of the origin of the moral sense and of
moral life, given in _The Descent of Man_, to be true, it is an
account of the origin only. Though profoundly significant, as well as
profoundly interesting, it is not more significant, compared with the
subsequent development, than is the origin of physical life compared
with the subsequent history of living beings. Suppose a mineralogist or
a chemist were to succeed in discovering the exact point at which
inorganic matter gave birth to the organic; his discovery would be
momentous and would convey to us a most distinct assurance of the method
by which the governing power of the universe works: but would it qualify
the mineralogist or the chemist to give a full account of all the
diversities of animal life, and of the history of man? Heroism, self-
sacrifice, the sense of moral beauty, the refined affections of
civilized men, philanthropy, the desire of realizing a high moral ideal,
whatever else they may be, are not tribal self-preservation subtilized
into etiquette; nor are they adequately explained by reference to the
permanent character of one set of impressions and the occasional
character of another set. Between the origin of moral life and its
present manifestation has intervened something so considerable as to
baffle any anticipation of the destiny of humanity which could have been
formed for a mere inspection of the rudiments. We may call this
intervening force circumstance, if we please, provided we remember that
calling it circumstance does not settle its nature, or exclude the
existence of a power acting through circumstance as the method of
fulfilling a design.

Whatever things may have been in their origin, they are what they are,
both in themselves and in regard to their indications respecting other
beings or influences the existence of which may be implied in theirs.
The connection between the embryo and the adult man, with his moral
sense and intelligence, and all that these imply, is manifest, as well
as the gradual evolution of the one out of the other, and a conclusive
argument is hence derived against certain superstitions or fantastic
beliefs; but the embryo is not a man, neither is the man an embryo. A
physiologist sets before us a set of plates showing the similarity
between the embryo of Newton and that of his dog Diamond. The inference
which he probably expects us to draw is that there is no essential
difference between the philosopher and the dog. But surely it is at
least as logical to infer, that the importance of the embryo and the
significance of embryological similarities may not be so great as the
physiologist is disposed to believe.

So with regard to human institutions. The writer on legal antiquities
before mentioned finds two sets of institutions which are now directly
opposed to each other, and between the respective advocates of which a
controversy has been waged. He proposes to terminate that controversy by
showing that though the two rival systems in their development are so
different, in their origin they were the same. This seems very clearly
to bring home to us the fact that, important as the results of an
investigation of origins are, there is still a limit to their
importance.

Again, while we allow no prejudice to stand in the way of our acceptance
of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We
may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the
future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut
up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the
mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The
series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic,
from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it
be arrested there? Why should it not continue its upward course and
arrive at a development which might be designated as spiritual life?
Surely the presumption is in favour of a continued operation of the law.
Nothing can be more arbitrary than the proceeding of Comte, who, after
tracing humanity, as he thinks, through the Theological and Metaphysical
stages into the Positive, there closes the series and assumes that the
Positive stage is absolutely final. How can he be sure that it will not
be followed, for example, by one in which man will apprehend and commune
with the Ruler of the Universe, not through mythology or dogma, but
through Science? He may have had no experience of such a phase of human
existence, nor may he be able at present distinctly to conceive it. But
had he lived in the Theological or the Metaphysical era he would have
been equally without experience of the Positive, and have had the same
difficulty in conceiving its existence. His finality is an assumption
apparently without foundation.

By Spiritual Life we do not mean the life of a disembodied spirit, or
anything supernatural and anti-scientific, but a life the motives of
which are beyond the world of sense, and the aim of which is an ideal,
individual and collective, which may be approached but cannot be
attained under our present conditions, and the conception of which
involves the hope of an ulterior and better state. The Positivists
themselves often use the word "spiritual," and it may be assumed that
they mean by it something higher in the way of aspiration than what is
denoted by the mere term moral, though they may not look forward to any
other state of being than this.

We do not presume, of course, in these few pages to broach any great
question, our only purpose being to point out a possible aberration or
exaggeration of the prevailing school of thought. But it must surely be
apparent to the moral philosopher, no less than to the student of
history, that at the time of the appearance of Christianity, a crisis
took place in the development of humanity which may be not unfitly
described as the commencement of Spiritual Life. The change was not
abrupt. It had been preceded and heralded by the increasing spirituality
of the Hebrew religion, especially in the teachings of the prophets, by
the spiritualization of Greek philosophy, and perhaps by the sublimation
of Roman duty; but it was critical and decided. So much is admitted even
by those who deplore the advent of Christianity as a fatal historical
catastrophe, which turned away men's minds from the improvement of their
material condition to the pursuit of a chimerical ideal. Faith, Hope,
and Charity, by which the Gospel designates the triple manifestation of
spiritual life, are new names for new things; for it is needless to say
that in classical Greek the words have nothing like their Gospel
signification. It would be difficult, we believe, to find in any Greek
or Roman writer an expression of hope for the future of humanity. The
nearest approach to such a sentiment, perhaps, is in the political
Utopianism of Plato. The social ideal is placed in a golden age which
has irretrievably passed away. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, even if it were
a more serious production than it is, seems to refer to nothing more
than the pacification of the Roman Empire and the restoration of its
material prosperity by Augustus. But Christianity, in the Apocalypse, at
once breaks forth into a confident prediction of the ultimate triumph of
good over evil, and of the realization of the ideal.

The moral aspiration--the striving after an ideal of character, personal
and social, the former in and through the latter--seems to be the
special note of the life, institutions, literature, and art of
Christendom. Christian Fiction, for example, is pervaded by an interest
in the development and elevation of character for which we look in vain
in the _Arabian Nights_, where there is no development of
character, nothing but incident and adventure. Christian sculpture,
inferior perhaps in workmanship to that of Phidias, derives its superior
interest from its constant suggestion of a spiritual ideal. The
Christian lives, in a manner, two lives, an outward one of necessary
conformity to the fashions and ordinances of the present world; an inner
one of protest against the present world and anticipation of an ideal
state of things; and this duality is reproduced in the separate
existence of the spiritual society or Church, submitting to existing
social arrangements, yet struggling to transcend them, and to transmute
society by the realization of the Christian's social ideal. With this is
necessarily connected a readiness to sacrifice present to future good,
and the interests of the present to future good, and the interests of
the present world to those of the world of hope. Apart from this, the
death of Christ (and that of Socrates also), instead of being an
instance of "sweet reasonableness," would be out of the pale of reason
altogether.

It is perhaps the absence of an ideal that prevents our feeling
satisfied with Utilitarianism. The Utilitarian definition of morality
has been so much enlarged, and made to coincide so completely with
ordinary definitions in point of mere extent, that the difference
between Utilitarianism and ordinary Moral Philosophy seems to have
become almost verbal. Yet we feel that there is something wanting. There
is no ideal of character. And where there is no ideal of character there
can hardly be such a thing as a sense of moral beauty. A Utilitarian
perhaps would say that perfect utility is beauty. But whatever may be
the case with material beauty, moral beauty at all events seems to
contain an element not identical with the satisfaction produced by the
appearance of perfect utility, but suggestive of an unfulfilled ideal.

Suppose spiritual life necessarily implies the expectation of a Future
State, has physical science anything to say against that expectation?
Physical Science is nothing more than the perceptions of our five bodily
senses registered and methodized. But what are these five senses?
According to physical science itself, nerves in a certain stage of
evolution. Why then should it be assumed that their account of the
universe, or of our relations to it, is exhaustive and final? Why
should it be assumed that these are the only possible organs of
perception, and that no other faculties or means of communication with
the universe can ever in the course of evolution be developed in man?
Around us are animals absolutely unconscious, so far as we can discern,
of that universe which Science has revealed to us. A sea anemone, if it
can reflect, probably feels as confident that it perceives everything
capable of being perceived as the man of science. The reasonable
supposition, surely, is that though Science, so far as it goes, is real,
and the guide of our present life, its relation to the sum of things is
not much more considerable than that of the perceptions of the lower
orders of animals. That our notions of the universe have been so vastly
enlarged by the mere invention of astronomical instruments is enough in
itself to suggest the possibility of further and infinitely greater
enlargement. To our bodily senses, no doubt, and to physical science,
which is limited by them, human existence seems to end with death; but
if there is anything in our nature which tells us, with a distinctness
and persistency equal to those of our sensible perceptions, that hope
and responsibility extend beyond death, why is this assurance not as
much to be trusted as that of the bodily sense itself? There is
apparently no ultimate criterion of truth, whether physical or moral,
except our inability, constituted as we are to believe otherwise; and
this criterion seems to be satisfied by a universal and ineradicable
moral conviction as well as by a universal and irresistible impression
of sense.