i8g 3 . EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 65 



of all things, both on his own account and in his interpretation of the 

 old world philosophers. In the physical world impermanence means 

 no more than constant movement; that energy rather than inert matter 

 is the conspicuous phenomenon. In the mental world, it is true " that 

 no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world 

 that it is." But that is an ultimate metaphysical difficulty in a 

 manner distinctive of all thinking, in a manner distinctive of none. 

 The human mind is conditioned by its own limitations, but these 

 limitations are conditions to be held in the background of all argu- 

 ment, an understood preamble in all thinking, and by no means to 

 form an " in-and-out clause " in questions at issue. 



Nor is it indisputable that Professor Huxley has assigned their 

 proper value to pain and suffering in the world of life. Even if it 

 were true that the consummation of pain is reached only " in man, 

 the member of an organised polity," this were no isolated fact of 

 far-reaching ethical import ; but a fact in dependence on the in- 

 creased intelligence of civilised man, an intelligence equally susceptible 

 of increased pleasure as of increased pain. For suffering in the 

 animal world, let Wallace and Darwin answer: "On the whole, then, 

 we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle for existence entail- 

 ing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the 

 truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the en- 

 joyment of life with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given 

 the necessity of death and reproduction — and without these there 

 could have been no progressive development of the organic world 

 — and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater 

 balance of happiness could have been secured. And this view was 

 evidently that of Darwin himself, who thus concludes his chapter on 

 the struggle for existence : ' When we reflect on this struggle, we may 

 console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not 

 incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that 

 the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.' " - 



It is not, then, inevitable to regard the cosmic process as evil. 

 Even when man, in various ages, had elaborated the conception of 

 abstract goodness, and had endeavoured to make his justice a 

 doling out of reward and punishment according to merit, it was not 

 necessary to bring in a verdict of guilty against the cosmos. It 

 is quite true that man has seen in all ages the sun shine on the just 

 and the unjust. But it is an easy reflection that the world could 

 not turn round on individual merit, and that if few are so guilty as to 

 deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, still fewer deserve 

 some of the simpler and most common joys of life. Behind the 

 "self-hypnotised catalepsy" of the devotee of Brahma, behind 

 the aspirations towards Nirvana, behind the " apatheia " of the 

 Stoics, there was a recognition of this worthlessness of the individual : 



'-■ Wallace's "Darwinism," p. 39. 



