322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ETHICS IN NATURAL LAW.* 



By Dr. LEWIS G. JANES. 



RESTING recently for a brief while, apart from the stress and 

 turmoil of metropolitan life, close to the heart of Nature, in 

 a tree-embowered home in a quiet New Jersey hamlet, whence the 

 eye wandered across green fields to a distant wooded crest, invit- 

 ing conquest by its promise of entrancing views the sun flick- 

 ering here and there through the overhanging boughs of the 

 clustering maples which furnished grateful protection from its in- 

 tenser heats the earth-goddess wooed me irresistibly to optimistic 

 contemplation of her supreme beneficence. But anon, in cyclonic 

 rage, she hid the mountain crest in blinding mists, tossed the over- 

 hanging branches until they swayed like ocean waves before the 

 blast, hurled limbs and fruit to earth, and through the long vigil 

 of the night aroused the most lively feelings of apprehension for 

 the safety of life and property. Again, treading the wooded 

 crest in thoughtful contemplation, beneath its peaceful summer 

 dress I found evidences of the Titanic struggles of former ages 

 huge columns of basaltic rock upheaved by Plutonic forces, and 

 here, where the stream runs so gently and falls so musically to 

 the lower level of the plain, was once the crater of a now long- 

 extinct volcano. 



From ages dim and remote, when the earth was a molten ball, 

 the theater of fierce Plutonic activities, to the present time, when 

 it woos and buffets man by turns as he applies his energies to its 

 conquest, the " struggle for existence " has gone forward, deter- 

 mining in partnership with Nature's other evolutionary con- 

 ditions the form and structure of continents and seas, the birth 

 and growth of animal and vegetable life upon the planet, the ori- 

 gin of the human race out of brute ancestral conditions, and its 

 progress toward a higher civilization. 



Taking man as he is at his best, with a high sense of ethical 

 obligation dominant in his consciousness, and aspirations for a 

 nobler personality and better social conditions guiding his actions, 

 what shall we say of the rational attitude of his mind toward the 

 cosmic process which has given him birth, and upon which he 

 is. still dependent for the physical conditions of life ? What of 

 his moral nature as related to this process ? What of the ethical 

 attitude of the universe to man ? 



Upon this problem Prof. Huxley, one of the most versatile and 

 virile writers among the modern Apostles of the doctrine of evo- 

 lution, has recently exercised his trenchant pen ; and the outcome 



* Read before the Congress of Evolutionists, Chicago, September 30, 1893. 



