1888.] on Antagonism. 285 



There are propositions applying more or less to what I am going 

 to say of some antiquity. 



Heraclitus, quoted by Prof. Huxley, said : " War is the father 

 and king of all things." Hobbes said war is the natural state of 

 man, but his expressions have about them some little ambiguity. In 

 Chapter I. of the ' De Corpore Politico ' he says, " Irresistible might 

 in a state of nature is right," and " The estate of man in this natural 

 liberty is war." Subsequently he says : " A man gives up his natural 

 right, for when divers men having right not only to all things else, 

 but to one another's persons, if they use the same there ariseth thereby 

 invasion on the one part and resistance on the other, which is war, 

 and therefore contrary to the laiv of Nature, the sum whereof consistetk 

 in making peace." I can only explain this apparent inconsistency by 

 supposing he meant *' law of Nature " to be something different from 

 *' the natural estate of man," and that the making peace was the first 

 effort at contract, or the beginning of law ; but then why call it the 

 ^'laio of Nature,'' where he says might is right? There is some 

 obscurity in the passage. 



The Persian divinities, Ormuzd and Ahriman, were the supposed 

 rulers or representatives of good and evil, always at war, and causing 

 the continuous struggles between human beings animated respectively 

 by these two principles. Undoubtedly good and evil are antagonistic, 

 but antagonism, as I view it, is as necessary to good as to evil, as 

 necessary to Ormuzd as to Ahriman. ' Zoroaster's religion of a Divine 

 being, one and indivisible, but with two sides, is, to my mind, a more 

 philosophical conception. The views of Lamarck on the modification 

 of organic beings by effort, and the establishment of the doctrine of 

 Darwin as to the effects produced by the struggle for existence and 

 domination, come much nearer to my subject. Darwin has shown 

 how these struggles have modified the forms and habits of organised 

 beings, and tended to increased differentiation, and Prof. Huxley 

 and Herbert Spencer have powerfully promoted and expanded these 

 doctrines. To the latter we owe the happy phrase, " survival of the 

 fittest," and Prof. Huxley has recently, in a paper in the 'Nine- 

 teenth Century,' anticipated some points I should have adverted to 

 as to the social struggles for existence. To be anticipated, and by a 

 very short period, is always trying, but it is more trying when what 

 you intended to say has been said by your predecessor in more terse 

 and appropriate language than you have at your command. 



I propose to deal with "antagonism" inductively, i.e. with facts 

 derived from observation alone, and not to meddle with spiritual 

 matters or with consequences. 



Let us begin with what we know of the visible universe, viz. 

 suns, planets, comets, meteorites, and their effects. These are all 

 pulling at each other, and resisting that pull by the action of other 

 forces. 



Any change in this pulling force produces a change, or, as it is 

 called, perturbation, in the motion of the body pulled. The planet 



