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                   WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF LIFE?

                         by Grant Allen


Reproduced from the "Roots of Atheism" series of the _American
Atheist_ magazine. This essay appeared in the February 1991 issue
of that journal.

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     The following essay originally appeared in _The Hand of God
and Other Posthumous Essays_ written by Grant Allen and published
in 1909 by Watts & Co., a Atheist publisher in London. The work
was issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited.

     Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a Canadian-born writer of fiction
and popularizations of scientific material. As part of his
advocacy of freethought, he wrote extensively on the origins of
religion, postulating that the worship of the dead was the basis
of all religion.

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     From the modern evolutionary point of view, the very question
"What do we live for?" becomes, when abstractly regarded, in
itself superfluous and meaningless. For it implies that everything
has an object or purpose; implies, in fact, the old, exploded
dogmatic fallacy that the cosmos has been constructed upon a
definite plan and with a deliberate design, instead of being
merely, as we now know it to be, the inevitable outcome of
unconscious energies. In order to see the true futility of the
naked question we need only ask ourselves the exactly analogous
and parallel question, "What is the object of the nebula in
Orion?" or "What do the satellites of Saturn revolve for?" The
obvious answer is, that Orion's nebula and Saturn's moons exist
where they are, and act as they do act, not for any profound and
hidden cosmical purpose, but simply because, in the ceaseless
redistribution of matter and motion which constitutes the process
of evolution, those particular masses of cosmic material were so
conditioned as regards environing forces and energies that they
had to move in such or such particular curves or orbits, and in no
other. There is no _why_ in the case at all; there is merely the
fact, with nothing else behind it.


     To suppose otherwise is to fall implicitly into
anthropomorphic and anthropocentric error. It is to figure to
one's self the universe as an objective totality, worked upon from
without by a vast and idealised quasi-human artificer and
designer, who moulds and models every part and detail of his work
with special reference to its preordained place in his projected
scheme of a cosmical system. Those who think in this manner think
anthropomorphically; they accept that conception of the outer
world which Herbert Spencer(1) well describes as the "carpenter
theory of creation." More than that, they think
anthropocentrically as well. For this whole idea of an object for
everything in the universe has been imported into the wider fields
of thought -- into astronomy, for example, and into ontology --
from the theological explanations usually given of small
difficulties in the practical life of human beings. "What is the
use of earwigs?" people ask, taking for granted that earwigs and
everything else must have a use; and by a use implicitly meaning
to say, a definite purpose of good for the human species.
Darwinism, however, has conclusively taught us that in this sense
nothing is useful; the earwig exists for itself alone; every
species of plant or animal is adapted solely for its own good, and
fills no place or subserves no purpose (save incidentally) in the
life of any other species whatever, the human included. The seeds
of wheat are not for us to feed upon, but to perpetuate the kind
of the parent wheat plant. The fur of the ermine is not for us to
make judges' robes of, but to keep the ermine himself snug and
warm, and to enable him to steal unperceived upon his prey in the
white snowfields of a northern winter. We know now that every part
of every plant and every animal is designed, not to subserve any
function "in the wider economy of nature" (which always means, on
human lips, with ultimate reference to some purely human want),
but to subserve the needs and functions of the species itself to
which it belongs, and no other.


     Life as a whole, therefore, has no object, any more than the
revolution of the planets has an object, or the double refraction
of Iceland spar, or the particular flow of the black currents that
swirl and eddy below the spray of Niagara. All these things are
the necessary outcome of pre-existent conditions; their laws of
sequence and causation can be investigated and proved; but the
idea of an object as applied to them is philosophically
inadmissible; for an object implies a person who designs, a person
who overcomes particular difficulties in the raw material on which
he works, by some particular and cunning arrangement of its parts
and organs. But the power which underlies the universe works on
very different lines indeed from these. We only degrade it to our
own puny level of handicraft by conceiving of it (to use Paley's
famous analogy(2)) as we conceive of a watchmaker making a watch.
Life is merely one particular set of correlated movements
occurring under the influence of solar radiation, in a certain
peculiar group of material bodies on the surface of one small and
unimportant planet, in a minor solar system, hidden away on the
skirts of a galaxy in some lost corner of a boundless cosmos. Why
on earth should it have a purpose to subserve any more than the
bubbles that rise and fall aimlessly on the wave, or the terrific
commotions that rend and revolutionise the sun's photosphere?


     Nor does human life, so far as science can tell us, fall
under any different category. The human race is one of the most
advanced groups of terrestrial mammals, and, therefore, a highly
evolved final outcome of kinetic energy, falling upon the aqueous
and gaseous envelopes of this particular earth's surface. But,
viewed abstractly, it cannot have any special purpose to subserve
in the scheme of the universe, any more than the fungus of the
vine-disease, or the maidenhair fern, or the little green aphides
that feed upon our rose-bushes; because, first of all, the
universe has no scheme; and, further, man is only a result of just
the same local causes in a petty satellite as all the rest of the
living creatures yet known to us. Pushed to its very furthest
term, the idea of a purpose necessarily implies that the cosmos
was made by a sort of glorified great Man, and that he made it all
for the ultimate benefit of the lesser men, created in his own
image, who occupy a fragment of dry land in one of the tiniest and
most insignificant of its component bodies. The question of the
object of life really descends to us from a time when men did not
in the least realise their own absolute and utter smallness in the
hierarchy of nature. They thought the universe was made for them,
as implicitly as the London cockroach still believes that London
was built in order to afford a convenient home, in its well-warmed
kitchens, for myriads of sleek and well-fed cockroaches.


     So much for the abstract view of the question. Life as a
whole, and human life in particular, can have no object at all,
looked at from outside, as component factors in that vast
assemblage of atoms and energies that we call the cosmos. No more
has the sun; no more has the milky way; no more has the little
wingless parasite that lives between the close and jointed armour
of the honey-bee. But, looked at from inside, as a question of
mere personal conduct, life has, of course, an object of some sort
for each individual person; and in so far as the race is made up
of individuals, the average object of all put together may be
looked upon as the object of the entire aggregate.


     Can we find any such objects common to the vast mass of
individuals? Perhaps not. Two only seem to be fairly universal,
and those two are, to a large extent, unconscious. They are,
first, self-preservation; and, secondly, race-preservation, as
shown in the production and care of children.


     I know this is an unfamiliar view, but it is one forced upon
us by biological considerations. Every species of plant or animal
knows, as a species, but one main desire -- specific continuation.
This desire produces two effects -- devices for the preservation
of the individual, and devices for the due production and culture
of new generations. The sole purpose of humanity, as such,
therefore, seems to be its own continuous perpetuation. And, in
effect, who can doubt that such is really the main central object
of our race? If we view humanity from outside, as objectively
given to us in the street, the shop, the house, the factory, do we
not see it forever striving simply, through its millionfold
embodiments, for daily bread for itself and its children? Is not
hunger the most imperative stimulus of the species, and, after
hunger, the need for warmth, for fuel, for clothing? Supply these
needs, and what comes next? The instinctive impulse to take to
one's self a wife and family. Every man's first want in life is
self-maintenance; that attained, his next want is marriage and
children. The profoundest ingrained feelings of the race are the
feelings that prompt, first, to the preservation of the individual
life; next, to the perpetuation and propagation of the species. To
some extent, indeed, the last aim, which is the most important for
the race as a whole, outweighs the first one; for parents are
frequently ready to sacrifice themselves on behalf of their
children; and in our existing industrial state a vast number of
parents do, more or less completely, so sacrifice themselves, by
working harder, longer, and more continuously than is at all
desirable from the point of view of individual preservation alone.


     "But these two aims, the main central aims of the human
species, are not, for the most part, consciously present to men at
all, as an integral portion of their object in life." No,
certainly not. They are innate and inherent, not reasoned and
deliberate -- physiological, not psychological. The question
whether life is worth living is a question which nature, blind,
dumb nature, never posits definitely to herself. If she did, it
could have no effect upon her. Suppose a certain number of living
beings -- say the whole human race -- to have thoroughly convinced
themselves of the pessimistic position, to be quite certain of the
undesirability of existence; and, in pursuance of that conscious
bit of ratiocination, to set aside all the instinctive love of
life, and to commit one great unanimous holocaust of universal
suicide -- what would be the consequence? Why, simply that the
next highest remaining animals would go on, under stress of
circumstances, evolving to something much like the human
condition, and that history would, on the whole, pretty well
repeat itself, barring the minor details of special incidents. The
creatures that were  not rational enough to kill themselves out 
and extinguish their race would go on living, and would do so just
in virtue of these instinctive "objects of life" which underlie
all our conscious wishes and preferences. Men live, in the main,
not for the objects that make life "worth living," but for the
blind instincts and innate impulses they can never get rid of.


     Nevertheless, there are purposes in life which seem
(fallaciously enough) to the reasoning minority among us to
constitute the sufficient ground (if any) for continued existence.
Why do we not all commit suicide? That is, in fact, the real
inquiry which veils itself under all the nebulous current
pessimistic questioning as to the use and value and import of
life. The answers are various -- various in the degree of human
idiosyncrasy. The vast majority do not commit suicide because they
are restrained from it by pure instinct. The natural clinging to
life is far too strong for them. And, indeed, if it comes to that,
they have never even asked themselves the question, "What do I
live for?" Furthermore, they are mostly of opinion that suicide
(or death generally, for that matter) does not really terminate
existence. They believe they would be jumping, only too literally,
out of the frying-pan into the fire. Of the remainder, the
cultivated and educated minority, some are, no doubt, more or less
optimistic by nature; admitting the world to be (for us) far from
perfect, they are prepared, at any rate, to make the best of it.
That is, perhaps, all things considered, about the sanest and
wisest philosophy left us. The final residuum, the pessimists pure
and simple, remain alive because it is so very troublesome and
difficult to commit suicide. Besides, they always want to do
something or other special to-morrow. The plot-interest of life is
sufficient to deter them. Usually it takes the form of wife and
children, acquired, no doubt, before the duty of checking the
multiplication of the human race became quite apparent to their
emancipated understandings.


     But if human life has in this very restricted sense any
general object at all -- any conscious object present as a rule to
the mind of the individual -- that object is undoubtedly
happiness, and happiness may be approximately defined as a decided
surplus of personal pleasure over personal pain. In the species as
a whole, no such object is primarily inherent; race-preservation
is its sole generic aim and purpose. But inasmuch as pleasure, on
the whole, roughly coincides with race-preservative activities,
and pain, on the whole, roughly coincides with race-destructive
activities (as I have endeavoured to show in _Physiological
Aesthetics_), (3) it follows that these two apparently distinct
objects, the unconscious generic aim, and the conscious individual
aim, are at bottom practically almost identical. In other words,
what to the race is preservative instinct is to the individual, in
nine cases out of ten, the conscious pursuit of his own happiness.


     His own happiness I say advisedly, but not necessarily to the
exclusion of the happiness of others. Quite the contrary: even in
the lowest races some regard for the happiness of wives and
offspring enters into the concept of happiness for the individual,
and among the higher outcomes of the highest races pleasure for
others has become a necessary element in pleasure for self. One
cannot yet say that in humanity as a whole the object of life, as
consciously apprehended, includes the idea of equal happiness for
all, but an approximation is ever being made in that direction.
Misery for others, especially when brought home to us, suffices to
make most members of the higher races thoroughly miserable, and
the tendency is always to minimise as far as possible such misery,
and to equalise as far as possible all available means of
pleasure. Such a consummation -- the socialistic and Christian
ideal -- is continually retarded by the as yet unconquered
selfishness of the mass of men, and it is also at least retarded
equally by the existing bad social arrangements and the blind
conservatism of even well-meaning and philanthropic people. But as
an ideal goal, realised already by the chosen few of all nations,
we may say that the aim and object of human life in its entirety,
apart from the conflicting aims and objects of its several
component elements, is the greatest total happiness of all,
consistent with the equal individual happiness of each separately.


     In our present confessedly imperfect moral state this ideal
goal is recognised by only very few; it is aimed at, it must be
feared, by fewer still. The actual object of life, as conceived by
the vast majority of existing human beings, is the enjoyment of
mere selfish personal pleasure and the avoidance of threatened
personal pain, with very little regard at all to the imagined
pleasures or pains of others. And so far as mankind in the lump
can be said now to live for anything in particular, outside the
instinctively guarded aim of race-preservation, such purely
selfish and personal happiness is the real object that most of
them live for. Even in the worst cases, however, it is slightly
tempered by the thin end of the altruistic wedge, which
necessarily comes in, no matter how imperfectly, with the first
introduction of the wife and children.

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NOTES:
1. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English philosopher, attempted to
create a systemic account of all cosmic phenomena, including
mental and social principles.
2. In _Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and
Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature_
(1802), William Paley (1743-1805), an English theologian,
developed the famous analogy of god as a superhuman watchmaker who
fashioned the machine of the world. He argued that traces of an
"intelligent maker" are evident in the structure of the world.
3. A book by Grant Allen published in 1877.

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Reproduced by permission from the _American Atheist_ magazine.
Copyright 1991 by American Atheist Press. All rights reserved