EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 187 



optimism, with its perfectibility of the species, reign of peace, and 

 lion and lamb transformation scenes ; but one does not hear so 

 much of it as one did forty years ago ; indeed, I imagine it is to 

 be met with more commonly at the tables of the healthy and 

 wealthy than in the congregations of the wise. The majority of 

 us, I apprehend, profess neither pessimism nor optimism. We 

 hold that the world is neither so good nor so bad as it conceivably 

 might be, and as most of us have reason, now and again, to dis- 

 cover that it can be. Those who have failed to experience the 

 joys that make life worth living are, probably, in as small a 

 minority as those who have never known the griefs that rob 

 existence of its savor and turn its richest fruits into mere dust 

 and ashes. 



Further, I think I do not err in assuming that, however diverse 

 their views on philosophical and religious matters, most men are 

 agreed that the proportion of good and evil in life may be very 

 sensibly affected by human action. I never heard anybody doubt 

 that the evil may be thus increased or diminished, and it would 

 seem to follow that good must be similarly susceptible of addition 

 or subtraction. Finally, to my knowledge, nobody professes to 

 doubt that, so far forth as we possess a power of bettering things, 

 it is our paramount duty to use it and to train all our intellect and 

 energy to this supreme service of our kind. 



Hence the pressing interest of the question, to what extent 

 modern progress in natural knowledge and, more esiDecially, 

 the general outcome of that progress in the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, is competent to help us in the great work of helping one 

 another. 



The propounders of what are called the " ethics of evolution," 

 when the " evolution of ethics " would usually better express the 

 object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less 

 interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favor of 

 the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other 

 natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, 

 for my own part, that they are on the right track ; but as the im- 

 moral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is so far as 

 much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and 

 the murderer follow Nature just as much as the philanthropist. 

 Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tenden- 

 cies of man may have come about, but in itself it is incompetent 

 to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable 

 to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, 

 we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic 

 faculty ; but all the understanding in the world will neither in- 

 crease nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful 

 and that is ugly. 



