EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 



requirements of the ethical ideal of the just and the 

 good. 



If there is one thing plainer than another, it is 

 that neither the pleasures, nor the pains, of life in the 

 merely animal world are distributed according to 

 desert ; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower 

 orders of sentient beings to deserve either the one 

 or the other. If there is a generalization from 

 the facts of human life, which has the assent of 

 thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that 

 the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the 

 punishment which he deserves ; that the wicked 

 nourishes like a green bay tree, while the righteous 

 begs his bread ; that the sins of the fathers are visited 

 upon the children ; that, in the realm of nature, 

 ignorance is punished just as severely as wilful 

 wrong ; and that thousands upon thousands of 

 innocent beings suffer for the crime, or the uninten- 

 tional trespass, of one. 



Greek and Semite and Indian are agreed upon this 

 subject. The book of Job is at one with the ' Works 

 and Days' and the Buddhist Sutras; the Psalmist 

 and the Preacher of Israel, with the Tragic Poets of 

 Greece. What is a more common motive of the 

 ancient tragedy in fact, than the unfathomable in- 

 justice of the nature of things ; what is more deeply 

 felt to be true than its presentation of the destruction 

 of the blameless by the work of his own hands, or 

 by the fatal operation of the sins of others ? Surely 

 (Edipus was pure of heart ; it was the natural sequence 

 of events the cosmic process which drove him, in all 



