EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 181 



auditors must liave observed that more than once I have bor- 

 rowed from him in the brief exposition of the theory of evolution 

 with which this discourse commenced. 



But when the focus of Greek intellectual activity shifted to 

 Athens, the leading minds concentrated their attention upon eth- 

 ical problems. For saking the study of themacrocosm for that of 

 the microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great 

 Ephesian, which I imagine is more intelligible to us than it was 

 to Socrates or to Plato. Socrates more especially set the fashion 

 of a kind of inverse agnosticism, by teaching that the problems 

 of physics lie beyond the reach of the human intellect ; that the 

 attempt to solve them is essentially vain ; that the one worthy 

 object of investigation is the problem of ethical life ; and his ex- 

 ample was followed by the Cynics and the later Stoics. Even the 

 comprehensive knowledge and the penetrating intellect of Aris- 

 totle failed to suggest to him that in holding the eternity of the 

 world within its present range of mutation, he was making a 

 retrogressive step. The scientific heritage of Heracleitus passed 

 into the hands neither of Plato nor of Aristotle, but into those of 

 Democritus. But the world was not yet ready to receive the 

 great conceptions of the philosopher of Abdera. It was reserved 

 for the Stoics to return to the track marked out by the earlier 

 philosophers, and, professing themselves disciples of Heracleitus, 

 to develop the idea of evolution systematically. In doing this, 

 they not only omitted some characteristic features of their mas- 

 ter's teaching, but they made additions altogether foreign to it. 

 One of the most influential of these importations was the trans- 

 cendental theism which had come into vogue. The restless, fiery 

 energy, operating according to law, out of which all things emerge 

 and into which they return, in the endless successive cycles of the 

 great year ; which creates and destroys worlds as a wanton child 

 builds up and, anon, levels sand castles on the seashore, was meta- 

 morphosed into a material world-soul, and decked out with all 

 the attributes of ideal Divinity ; not merely with infinite power 

 and transcendent wisdom, but with absolute goodness. 



The consequences of this step were momentous; for, if the 

 cosmos is the effect of an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely 

 beneficent cause, the existence in it of real evil, still less of neces- 

 sarily inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible.* Yet the universal 



* Pope's lines in the Essay on Man (Ep. i, 267, 268), 



" All are but parts of one etupendous whole, 

 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul," 



simply paraphrase Seneca's " quern in hoc mundo locum deus obtinet, hunc in homine ani- 

 mus: quod est illic materia, id nobis corpus est" (Ep. Ixv, 24) [And what God is in the 

 world, such is the mind or soul in man ; what in the world is matter^ in us is body. 



