The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
scientific character.
And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_
conditions of a given result? The French say that to have an omelet we
must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
condition of the omelet. But is it a sufficient condition? Does an
omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken? So of the Greek mind.
To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial
dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a
necessary condition. But if they are a sufficient condition, why did
not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence? No
geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can only
foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and
frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and
determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively
incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident
habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region
shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the
pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five
fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely
because the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have that
number. He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent
to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} not which,--but the
inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present
day. So of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in
tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a
matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.
Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of
China, India, England, Rome, etc. I have not the smallest hesitation
in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has
done with Hellas. He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and
show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
incompatible with its habitat. But he will utterly fail to show that
the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the
one necessary and only possible form.
Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
fauna and its environment are. An animal may better his chances of
existence in either of many ways,--growing aquatic, arboreal, or
subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more
fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other
ways besides,--and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
different environments.
Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--
"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its
freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its
uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation
that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the
Philippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with
the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as
arid as that of Timor. Yet between these corresponding groups of
islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to
the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the
greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions.
Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities in
the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to
corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries
themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo
and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be,
are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate
climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to
those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
with widely differing geographical environments. A singularly
accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[11]
uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
with great effect He says:--
"These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo-Latin
civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and the
Saracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
with obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of
agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown,
unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
European history.... These islands have dialects, but no language;
records of battles, but no history. They have customs, but no laws;
the _vendetta_, but no justice. They have wants and wealth, but no
commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping. They have legends, but no
poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
that they had universities, but no students.... That Sardinia, with
all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself.... Near
the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _à
priori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ on
the sounding-board of history."
This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
detail. All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
Sicily." Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
and her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they
stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I
will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
because no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism and
ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
ambition, and thirst for independent life. Corsicans and Sardinians
are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors. But the best
wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
torches seem to have been wanting.[12]
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get
vibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, many
geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is
why great epochs are so rare,--why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so
fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the
nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia
long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.
We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human
affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This
mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why
great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public
fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times
would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must
be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the
fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far
greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the
rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always
wear.
{244}
It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of something
inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences
any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert. Why, the
very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with _ifs_. The
physicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says it
will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it. And so the utmost the
student of sociology can ever predict is that _if_ a genius of a
certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might
long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and
Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in
starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that
the _modus operandi_ in each case would be subordination to a paramount
state rather than federation, because no historian could have
calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same
moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals
as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour. So of our own politics. It is
certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or
whatever one please to call them, will triumph. But whether it do so
by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new
party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot
say. There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make more
progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now in
ten without one. Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to
victory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither {245}
move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]
To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The lesson of the analysis
that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the
reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the
movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to