Science and Morals and Other EssaysWindle, Bertram Coghill Alan, Sir
Religion
Science and Morals and Other Essays
Windle, Bertram Coghill Alan, Sir
Essays; Religion and science; Science
Natural Selection, some would have us believe, is the dominant law of
living nature, and all would agree that it is an important law. Let us
then, if we are to follow Nature, put it into practice. But Natural
Selection means the Survival of the Fittest in the Struggle for Life. It
consequently means the Extermination of the Less Fit, a little fact
often left out of count. It means in three words "Might is Right," and
was not that exactly the proposition by which we were confronted in this
war? If Natural Selection be our only guide, let us sink hospital
ships, destroy innocent villages and towns, exterminate our weaker
opponents in any way that seems best to us. It was all summed up
centuries ago by the author of the Book of Wisdom: "Let us oppress the
poor just man, and not spare the widow, nor honour the ancient grey
hairs of the aged. But let your strength be the law of justice: for that
which is feeble is found to be nothing worth." That is Natural Selection
in operation in human life when human beings have been stripped of all
"mythical ideas of Sin:" not a pretty picture nor a condition of affairs
under which we should like long to exist. Some of the other resemblances
are less dreadful, but none the less instructive. Let us take the matter
of Mimicry. There is a form of protective mimicry whereby the living
thing is like unto its surroundings, and thus escapes its enemy. We find
it in warfare in the use of khaki dress, in white overalls in snow-time,
in other such expedients. But there is also a form of Aggressive Mimicry
in which a deadly thing makes itself look like something innocent, as
the wolf tried to look in "Little Red Riding Hood." "The Germans were
beginning their attack on Haumont. Their front-line skirmishers, to
throw us into confusion, had donned caps which were a faint imitation of
our own, and also provided themselves with Red Cross brassards" (_The
Battle of Verdun._ H. Dugard). Not to be tedious on this point, which
really does not require to be laboured, let me finish with one quotation
from a vivid series of war-pictures. Boyd Cable is writing of men in
the trenches: "Civilised Man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to
be taught one more simple lesson by the beast of the field and the birds
of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing
air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch
and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the
beat of its passing wing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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