Towards the Great Peace | Page 7

just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a certain
amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to
regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were
joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the
last century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate;
something else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by
evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it
appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the final
test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law; through its
lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life, the "descent of
man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the anthropoid ape,
and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had devised, or
could determine, a code of morality in which certain things were
eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very highly
developed animals to experience and environment, it had given weighty
support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy both
in theory and in act.
Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the
invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the
acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and
were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by
education; hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as
between man and man because of past discrepancies in environment,
opportunities, and education) could be equalized by a system of
teaching that aimed to furnish that mental and physical training hitherto
absent.
Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very
shortly this became the firm conviction of the great mass of men, and
the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are
equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized,
state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that
made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between
one man and another.
In another respect, however, the superstition of mechanical evolution
played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets

nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while
undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from
degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the rocket
rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures, even so
must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to
greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human
history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and then
yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood, or
prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the annals
of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable, unescapable
fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes a delusion
and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to incipient or
crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain dream of manifest
destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of the primary
gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last
years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking in
its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers
that threatened it then and now menace it with destruction.
When, therefore, modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July,
1914, we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry,
commerce, and finance, expressing itself through highly developed
specialists, and dictating the policies and practices of government,
society, and education; on the other, a democracy of form which denied,
combated, and destroyed distinction in personality and authority in
thought, and discouraged constructive leadership in the intellectual,
spiritual, and artistic spheres of activity. The opposition was absolute,
the results catastrophic. The lack of competent leadership in every
category of life finds a sufficient explanation in the two opposed forces,
in their origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.
In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be
difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that
were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present
century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical
system of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human
progress, and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world.
The plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events

though both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise.
The impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the
unfortunate effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of