IX. 



Professor Huxlev on Evolution and Ethics. 



P 



ROFESSOR HUXLEY'S zoological work is great, and it has 

 left an enduring mark on his science. He has lived in times 

 when a new idea has been a solvent corroding the incrustations of 

 tradition and habit, and those who knew the jewel of truth only by 

 its setting and tarnished ornament, hated and feared him. Acute 

 minds, orthodox or unorthodox, respected and admired him as a 

 master in the craft of controversy, honest and resolute, apt at keen 

 lunge and nimble recovery. But the great crowd who make reputa- 

 tions that iconoclastic historians of the future may have material, 

 see in him a constructive thinker — a prophet of the new era. And 

 so this delivery on " Evolution and Ethics " will be taken as coming 

 " with emphatic warrant," and must be subjected to a more critical 

 appreciation than the author himself may think fitting. 



Let me state the Professor's argument as clearly as I can. 

 Among the observed phenomena of the cosmos the most typical is 

 cyclical change. Thus, from the inert bean there grows up the bean- 

 plant, which, in its turn, produces other beans, and the wonder of 

 leaves and stem fades away. Such recurring cycles are the salient 

 feature in the shifting impermanence of the cosmos. In man, to 

 whom the stream of life has apparently led, we find that pain, present 

 everywhere, reaches its acutest point, and we find that his progress 

 has been such that the old ape and tiger habits of ruthless and cruel 

 aggression are only virtues belated in time, and become sins by the 

 accident of advance. Thus consideration of the cosmic process of 

 evolution brings man up against the mystery of evil. 



With the philosophers of Hindustan and Ionia, centuries before 

 our era, the changefulness of the phenomenal world, as well as the suffer- 

 ing in it, became apparent. When culture of the intellect and of the 

 pleasures followed material prosperity, there came exhaustion and 

 ennui and that "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and 

 who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." Originally the conception 

 Justice arose from some beginning like the compact of a wclf-pack, the 

 understanding not to attack one another while on the chase. From this 



1 Evolution and Ethics. By Thomas H. Huxley, F.R S. The Romanes 

 Lecture for 1893. London : Macmillan & Co., 1S93. 57 pp. Price 2s. net. 



