STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19388, 24 July 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE.

GLADIATORS' SHOW OR EDEN?

BY KOTARZ.

' Nature, so lovely on the surface, so reeking with horror and wantonness beneath it " —that is J. H. Curie's attitude to nature, and appears to have been Robert Louis Stevenson's, though we cannot be too sure of Stevenson. A poem may express a passing mood, something transitory, a mere ripple on the surface of the mind. The mind in its normal state may look in an entirely different direction; and a man is not to bo judged by a passing phase that may have its origin in physical weariness or the dejection of ill-health. Still, Stevenson has given the finest literary expression to the grim pessimism that the contemplation of nature has produced in Curie, and that is fundamental in all his thinking. Where Curie and Stevenson see only wanton slaughter, malicious cruelty, the soldier, Younghusband, with his love of the military virtues, his enthusiasm for a plucky fight and for physical fitness, sees a fine training ground for the development of the qualities he esteems. The literary man interprets according to his temperament, the soldier according to the values the military life has taught him. The Physicist. • Next on our list comes the physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver stands in the front rank of modern scientists. His latest book, " Evolution and Creation," has just come to hand. With that brilliant clarity that marks all his expositions, he gives a general survey of the field as it appears to the man of science of to-dav. But he has a wider motive. He is essentially a religious man, and he has found that he does not need to keep his science and his religion in separate compartments. The scientific and religious points of view, he declares, " need no longer be regarded as hostile or opposed to each other, but rather as < different facets of one and the same general truth." With this end in view he faces the same facts that produce in Curie a horror of great darkness. I cannot believe that Sir Oliver Lodge is a less humane man than J. H. Curie, less swift in sympathy, less open to the appeal of suffering. Yet I can find nothing in Lodge's book to indicate that the cruelty of nature presents to him any difficulties at all. He is Unmoved by the spectacle of Huxley's "gladiators' show;" as a scientist he must know a great deal more about the tragedies of the struggle for existence than a literary man of Curie's type. What is the crux of the situation to Curie simply does not matter from the scientist's point of view. In fact, where the one sees only horror and hate and despair, the other finds the grounds of a tremendous hope.

" Wore it not for our perception of this gradual method (i.e., evolution) the present state of mankind would be depressing. The opposite of evolution is stagnation, which would mean the abandonment of hope. Evolution is a discovery full of hope. We know more or less \v!;at we are, we know not what we shall be; but we realise that the result depends partly on our own exertions —aided and helped, but not compelled. The whoie creation works together to some great end, and happy are those that can be co-operative agents, even to a small degree, in the mighty process." Hope, Therq you have Lodge's thread to the labyrinth. It is the journey's end that justifies the pilgrimage. All the past aeons have wrought and suffered, to produce the present. The process still goes on, and now, with all the heritage the past has left us, we live our lives for the future further than thought can reach. The race moves onward and upward. We can either help or retard: but whatever our contribution, the one thing certain is that " existence must be of immense value." Why this " struggle for existence " unless existence has supreme value ? That is how the spectacle of the struggle for existence affects him. It gives him an assurance that life is of surpassing importance, and that it is moving toward the heights. He quotes with approval Browning's prophetic vision in " Paracelsus Man is not Man as Nor shall I deem his object served, ,ais end Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, , , While only here and there a star dispels The darkness, here and there a towering mind O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host .... Is out at once to the, despair of night, When all mankind alike is perfected. Equal in full-blown powers—then, not till then, I say, begins man's general infancy. So Lodge finds the course of the ages along the upward path full of hope and encouragement. The past guarantees the future, if man, the crown of the long process so far, will use for the highest ends the powers of mind bequeathed to him by the struggles of the past. He sees one danger. Man may fail. He may not rise to the height of this .great argument. He is not inexorably driven by fate; and if he chooses he may even yet bring to naught the millions of years of travail. But he has little fear of' that. Evil,, he sees, has in it the seeds of destruction; there, as part of its very naturt, are the elements that must pro- j duce decay. " Good it is which has the elements of persistence, survival, permanence, value. Truth, goodness, beauty: these are the things wmuh shall endure." It is hard to believe that and Curie are facing the same facts, so different are the conclusions each draws from his survey of life upon the earth. An optimist is a man who carries' his own sunshine, and I suppose a pessimist carries his own darkness. I find Lodge much more to my taste; and, anyway, this singular diversity of opinion should indicate how futile dogmatism nearly always is. For Lodge offers his opinion and quotes his evidence; while Curie drives home his strong dogmatisms with a sledge-hammer. The Biologist.'

But I was nearly forgetting my biologist. Professor J. Arthur Thomson has become so well known as a populariser of scientific knowledge that men are beginning to look askance at his work and question his authority. That is a common fate; it is hard for the public to believe that a man who is able to simplify the deep things of science and make them ineligible to the non-scientific mind can be a very profound student himself. But Thomson has both the knowledge and the gift oi expression; and this is his view of the struggle for existence, the contemplation of which produced so deep a melancholy in Stevenson " What is sometimes called the other side of the struggle for oxistence is really part of the struggle for existence which includes caring for others as well as caring for self. It Tneludes all the new moves in parental care, in the kindliness of kindred, in co-operation and mutual aid. In many cases the kin-instinct is a*s clear and as commanding as the self-preservative instinct. The world is indeed the abode of the strong, but it is aJso the home of many feeble folk who make up in iove what they lack in strength. The fact is that a iarge part of the time and energy of living creatures is devoted to activities which make not for selfadvancement, but for the welfare of the kind. The struggle includes more than increased competition; it includes, just as prominently, increased combination and mutual aid." In another book Thomson says the same thing more clearly and emphatically. " The ideal of evolution is thus no gladiators' show, but an Eden; it is much for pure natural history to see no longer struggle, but love as ' creation's final law.' "