EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 23 



era. Certain knowledge of them, in the fifth century, reaches us 

 from localities as distant as the valley of the Ganges and the Asi- 

 atic coasts of the ^gean. To the early philosophers of Hindu- 

 stan, no less than to those of Ionia, the salient and characteristic 

 feature of the phenomenal world was its changefulness ; the un- 

 resting flow of all things, through birth to visible being and 

 thence to not being, in which they could discern no sign of a be- 

 ginning and for which they saw no prospect of an ending. It was 

 no less plain to some of these antique forerunners of modern phi- 

 losophy that suffering is the badge of all the tribe of sentient 

 things ; that it is no accidental accompaniment, but an essential 

 constituent of the cosmic process. The energetic Greek might 

 find fierce joys in a world in which " strife is father and king " ; 

 but the old Aryan spirit was subdued to quietism in the Indian 

 sage ; the mist of suffering which spread over humanity hid every- 

 thing else from his view ; to him life was one with suffering and 

 suffering with life. 



In Hindustan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively high and tol- 

 erably stable civilization had succeeded long ages of semi-barba- 

 rism and struggle. Out of wealth and security had come leisure 

 and refinement, and, close at their heels, had followed the malady 

 of thought. To the struggle for bare existence, which never ends, 

 though it may be alleviated and partially disguised for a fortunate 

 few, succeeded the struggle to make existence intelligible and to 

 bring the order of things into harmony with the moral sense of 

 man, which also never ends, but, for the thinking few, becomes 

 keener with every increase of knowledge and with every step 

 toward the realization of a worthy ideal of life. 



Two thousand five hundred years ago, the value of civilization 

 was as apparent as it is now ; then, as now, it was obvious that 

 only in the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits hu- 

 manity is capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become 

 evident that the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The 

 garden was apt to turn into a hothouse. The stimulation of the 

 senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly multiplied the 

 sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the intellectual 

 field indefinitely extended the range of that especially human 

 faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting 

 present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, 

 wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that 

 very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emo- 

 tion which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally at- 

 tended by a proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffer- 

 ing ; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it created new 

 heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding 

 hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the 



