6i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consciously perhaps) " compound for sins we are inclined to by 

 damning those we have no mind to." So in the daily life of what 

 is called peace. The stage-coach proprietor rejoiced when he had 

 driven his rival off the road, railway directors and shareholders 

 now do the same, so do publicans, shopkeepers, and other rivals. 

 We are still permeated by the old notion of good and evil. But 

 " antagonism," as I view it, not only comprehends the relation of 

 good and evil, but, as I have said, produces both, and is as neces- 

 sary to good as to evil. Without it there would be neither good 

 nor evil. Judging of the lives of our progenitors from what we 

 see of the present races of men of less cerebral development, we 

 may characterize them as having been more impulsive than our- 

 selves, and as having their joys and sorrows more quickly alter- 

 nated. After the hunt for food, accompanied by privation and 

 suffering, comes the feast to gorging. Their main evil was starva- 

 tion, their good repletion. Even now the Esquimau watches a 

 seal-hole in the bitter cold for hours and days, and his compensa- 

 tion is the spearing and eating the seal. The good is resultant 

 upon and in the long run I suppose equivalent to the evil. These 

 men look not back into the past, and forward into the future, as 

 we do. We, by extending our thought over a wider area, are led 

 to more continuing sacrifices, and aim at more lasting enjoyment 

 in the result. The child suffers at school in order that his future 

 life may be more prosperous. The man spends the best part of his 

 life in arduous toil, physical or mental, in order that he may not 

 want in his later years, or that his family may reap the benefit of 

 his labor. Further-seeing men spend their whole lives on work 

 little remunerative that succeeding generations may be benefited. 

 The prudent man transmits health and wealth to his descendants, 

 the improvident man poverty or gout. One main element of what 

 we call civilization is the capability of looking further back into 

 the past, and further forward into the future ; but, though meas- 

 ured on a different scale, the average antagonism and approximate 

 equivalence appear to me to be the same. 



Can we suppose a state of things either in the inorganic or the 

 organic world which, consistently with our experience or any de- 

 duction drawn from it, would be without antagonism. In the 

 inorganic world it would be the absence of all movement, or, what 

 practically amounts to the same thing, movement of everything in 

 the same direction, and the same relative velocity ; for, as move- 

 ment is only known to us by relation, movement where nothing is 

 stationary or moving in a different direction, or with a different 

 velocity, would be unrecognizable. So in the organic but non- 

 sentient world, if there were no struggle, no absorption of food, no 

 growth, nothing to overcome, there would be nothing to call life. 

 If, again, in the sentient world there were no appetites, no hopes 



