Excerpt: ...in forcing the course on him? Clearly not. The whole would be regarded as a wasted effort and as an exhibition of gratuitous cruelty. Now when we look closely at this evolutionary process, who is it that benefits thereby? In a vague way we speak of the race benefiting. But the race is made up of individuals, and while it may be said the individual benefits from the experience through which the race has passed, it cannot be truthfully said that he is the better because he has gained from experience. He does not ...
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Excerpt: ...in forcing the course on him? Clearly not. The whole would be regarded as a wasted effort and as an exhibition of gratuitous cruelty. Now when we look closely at this evolutionary process, who is it that benefits thereby? In a vague way we speak of the race benefiting. But the race is made up of individuals, and while it may be said the individual benefits from the experience through which the race has passed, it cannot be truthfully said that he is the better because he has gained from experience. He does not pass through the discipline, he simply registers, so to speak, the result. And, therefore, so far as he is concerned, he is exactly in the position that the first man would have been had he possessed the endowment, social, and individual, which the present man has. There is no greater fallacy than that contained in the common saying that man learns through experience. Individually, so far as civilisation is concerned, that is not true. Were it true, civilisation would be impossible. If each man had to start where our primitive ancestors started, and learn from experience, we should end where the first generation of socialised human beings ended, and the generations of men would represent an endless series of first steps to which there would be no second ones. What the individual learns from experience is very little and would never serve to lift him from out the ranks of savagery. What he learns from the experience of the race is much, and gives the whole distinction between the civilised man and the savage. It is the discipline of the race, that experience which meets each of us in the form of traditions, counsels, Pg 105 institutions, etc., from which we get the really vital lessons of life. But if that is so the attempted justification of natural processes on the ground that God designed them as they are so that man might learn from experience breaks down. The individual does not so learn, but is presented with the products of the...
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