THE TRIUMPH OF THE BEST. 



they may be, are comparatively more moral, for they are 

 their superiors in the virtue of courage which gives them 

 strength and power. 



Prof. Huxley describes how the moralist, in the effort 

 to restore harmony, tries to account for the iniquities in 

 this world. He says : 



"From the theological side, we are told that this is a state of 

 probation, and that the seeming injustices and immoralities of 

 Nature will be compensated by and by. But how this compensa- 

 tion is to be effected, in the case of the great majority of sentient 

 things, is not clear. I apprehend that no one is seriously prepared 

 to maintain that the ghosts of all the myriads of generations of 

 herbivorous animals which lived during the millions of years of the 

 earth's duration before the appearance of man, and which have all 

 that time been tormented and devoured by carnivores, are to be 

 compensated by a perennial existence in clover; while the ghosts 

 of carnivores are to go to some kennel where there is neither a pan 

 of water nor a bone with any meat on it." 



This would indeed be a consistent consequence of a 

 soft -brained and weak-hearted system of ethics, which 

 praises the innocence and meritoriousness of mere suffer- 

 ing, and depicts as the ideal of morality a millennium of 

 eternal peace, where the struggle for existence is unknown, 

 where no labor nor painstaking is necessary and all time 

 is spent in the glorification of an all-wise Creator. 



Such a state of absolute perfection is impossible and 

 we must smile at the ingenuousness of those philosophers 

 who pretend to teach modern ethics and still adhere to the 

 old millennium idea of a life of perfect adaptation where 

 universal happiness will prevail. 



The error in this Utopian idea is easily seen if we 

 understand that the struggle for existence is inherent in 

 nature. The struggle for existence is not only not in 

 contradiction to ethics, it is on the contrary its most im- 

 portant factor, which must be taken into consideration and 

 is taken into consideration by the monistic view of ethics. 

 The old ethical view demands that man shall not resist 



