Divine Selection or The Survival of the Useful/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
Efficiency
SINCE the foregoing chapters were written, a new work has appeared from the pen of an avowed Evolutionist.[1] Its bold and startling assertions may warrant its consideration here, for it repudiates the governing principle in Evolution that has heretofore prevailed, and proposes a new basis for the solution of the very effects whose causes we are seeking. Furthermore, it is the first of a projected series on evolutionary philosophy, whereby it is hoped to revive faith in the cause, and by a new treatment adapt the theory to twentieth century thought.
The argument serves our purpose most efficiently in two ways. First, it is in harmony with these chapters, and reinforces its purpose in refuting the governing principle in Evolution as heretofore expounded. And second, the new governing principle of the evolutionary process offered, not only shows the inadequacy of evolutionary philosophy in general, but it also proposes a solution that, from one point of view, is separated but a step from the conclusions of the Theist.
The philosophy of the English Sociologists, which is nothing other than the doctrine of Evolution applied to the social status, Mr. Kidd thus relegates to antiquity, "There has been no system of ideas that has ever held the mind of the world from which the intellectual basis has been so completely struck away. That theory of human religions which so many minds have followed and surpassed Mr. Spencer in developing merely as a theory of survivals in the present; that theory of psychology, developed from Hume to Huxley, in which the content of the human mind is viewed simply as a condition in which the present is related to past experience either in the individual or in the race; that widely prevalent conception of social progress developed from Voltaire to Marx as a movement towards a state in which the self-conscious present is to be finally organized towards the complete expression of its own ascendant interests; have each passed definitely into the background, nevermore to receive the authoritative assent of the human intellect to its premises."[2]
In a summary, Mr. Kidd's theory is that natural selection operates, not to favor the individual or even the present, but that its interests are always in the future. Throughout the long ages of struggle, "efficiency in the future is the determining quality."[3] Mr. Kidd's theory of the governing principle in Evolution differs as widely from prevalent theories as he would have us believe. For Evolutionists have held hitherto that the controlling principle is in nature itself, seeking perpetually to preserve the present and to perpetuate it.
How fundamentally Mr. Kidd differs is evinced in these words, "The controlling center of the evolutionary process in our social history is not in the present at all, but in the future. It is in favor of the interests of the future that natural selection continually discriminates."[4]
This principle he calls "projected efficiency." In analyzing this idea we are led to ask, What is "projected efficiency?" Mr. Kidd's clearest idea appears in the following words, "It is a world in which, with the passing of the present under the control of the future, there is being accomplished for the first time in the development of the race the emancipation of the future in the present."[5]
Mr. Kidd strenuously maintains that natural selection does not operate alone to the advantage of existing individuals, but that efficiency in the future is ever the end in view.
The essence of projected efficiency is that the present is governed with reference to the future. It comprehends the greater use to which all things are subjected. But we still have to ask, What is the future? Is it an entity? Is it in existence? If not an entity in existence, how can it govern? We can get no nearer the solution of the controlling agency by shifting it as an undefined thing into the future. If it is the future that rules, "the future" must be defined before we have advanced one whit in wisdom or one whit nearer an explanation.
There is only one sense in which "projected efficiency" has any sane meaning, and that is that the government of the future is the government of Him who inhabits the future, and to whom the future is as the present. With this definition of "projected efficiency" we can rationally agree, for then the governing principle in natural selection is, as we have shown, Divine selection or the good of the future, as determined by Him who sees the end from the beginning, and governs all things accordingly.
Present progress is, in this sense, the perpetual emancipation of the future in the present, the perpetual emancipation of higher thought and life in the minds of men, unfolding out of the Spirit of God, in whom the future is in potency.
But since it is impossible for the future to have any power in the present, or for the present to project anything into the future before the future becomes the present, the term "projected efficiency" is misleading and inadequate. Since all advancement is from the unfolding of things that are in potency in the Spirit of God as it is received in nature and the hearts of men, it now only remains for some one again to assign the doctrine of "projected efficiency" to a "past and unenlightened age," and to formulate a modern doctrine of injected efficiency commendable to twentieth century intelligence.