VIII. LITERARY EVOLUTIONISM
The influence of the idea of evolution outside the
sciences and philosophy is well illustrated by the work
of Samuel Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and George
Bernard Shaw. They were primarily men of letters, and
may be taken to represent respectively the fields of
the novel, classical philology, and drama. All accepted
the idea of descent with modification, but all were
hostile to Darwinism and favorable to Lamarckism.
They did not, however, embody their objections in
scientific or philosophical arguments. They used vari-
ous literary forms for the expression of their views, and
often mingled rhetoric and invective with exposition.
Four broad themes appear in the writings of these
literary evolutionists.
(1) They objected to Darwin's admission of chance
or accident as an element in the evolutionary process.
Butler contended in his Evolution, Old and New (1879)
that a theory which invoked the notion of accidental
variations ultimately failed to account for the origin
of species. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck were, he
held, on much firmer ground when they attributed
variations to the purposive activity of organisms. Shaw
echoed Butler's contention in the Preface to his play,
Back to Methuselah (1921). The underlying concern
appears to have been to block any suggestion that
man's mental powers arose by chance, by affirming that
like all other organic attributes they are the outcome
of what living things have done to meet their needs
in the course of evolution.
(2) The literary evolutionists rejected Darwin's the-
ory of natural selection as a mechanistic misconception
which assigned far too much importance to the envi-
ronment. “The influence of 'environment' is nonsensi-
cally over-rated in Darwin,” Nietzsche wrote. “The
essential factor in the process of life is precisely the
tremendous inner power to shape and create new
forms, which merely uses, exploits 'environment'” (The
Will to Power, II, Sec. 647). Butler asserts in Luck or
Cunning? (1887) that living forms “design themselves
... into physical conformity with their own inten-
tions.” They do so by means of “unconscious memory”
which binds the generations together, allowing each
to profit from the experience of its ancestors. Shaw
ridicules the Darwinian theory which he calls “Cir-
cumstantial Selection.” It ignores “the simple fact” that
the impulse which produces evolution is creative. No
matter what the environment, “the will to do anything
can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity... create
and organize new tissue to do it with” (Preface, Back
to Methuselah).
(3) These vitalistic views were part of the basis on
which Nietzsche and Shaw envisaged the possibility
of the evolutionary improvement of man. Unlike pre-
Darwinian advocates of human perfectibility, they
believed that man has the capacity to surpass himself
and to become a new species. But this development
will not take place automatically. It has to be initiated
by men as they are now. Both writers were vague about
the steps needed to set the development going, and
also about the distinctive qualities that are to charac-
terize the new type of
homo—referred to as the
Übermensch by Nietzsche and as the superman by
Shaw. In the Prologue to
Also Sprach Zarathustra
(1883), Nietzsche urged that man must be seen as a
transitional being, “a rope tied between beast and
Übermensch—a rope across an abyss.... What is great
in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” Shaw
rejected the idea that the superman can be brought
about by any program of social reform. What is needed
is a profound collaboration with the creative impulse
or Life Force whose purposes are being realized in
the evolutionary process. Behind this theme lay the
recognition that evolutionism, by dissolving the con-
ception of a fixed human essence, had opened up
the possibility for man so to arrange things that
his descendants will become beings far superior to
himself.
(4) Shaw regarded his doctrine of the Life Force as
an evolutionary theology. In his plays, prefaces, and
speeches he identified the Life Force with God who
is striving to make himself. God is affirmed to be not
an infinite, omnipotent, and perfect being, but a finite
power, limited to working through the process of
evolution. The only method he can use in the effort
to become perfect is that of trial and error. This ac-
counts for the many failures which mark the history
of life. Man is the latest experiment to be tried, and
he is still on probation. If he fails to advance God's
purpose he will be scrapped, as the numerous extinct
species were. “We are not very successful attempts at
God,” Shaw declared; but we can nevertheless “work
towards that ideal, until we get to be supermen, and
then super-supermen, and then a world of organisms
who have achieved and realized God” (“The Religion
of the Future” [1911], p. 35).
Shaw's evolutionary theology was one of a number
of formulations of the idea of a finite, developing God
advocated in the twentieth century. The idea occurs
in William James, Bergson, Samuel Alexander, A. N.
Whitehead, and others. It appeared to provide a way
of reconciling the presence of a divine power in the
world with the suffering, cruelty, and waste exhibited
by the evolutionary process. The reconciliation is in
fact difficult to achieve. But the attempt to undertake
it shows how profoundly evolutionism had penetrated
the thought of the times.
