710 THE LESSON OF THE LIFE OF HUXLEY. 



fathers arc visited upon the children; that in the realm of nature ij^no- 

 rance is punished just as severely as willful wrong; that thousands 

 upon thousands of innocent beings suffer for the crime or the imintcn- 

 tional trespass of one." 



These two efforts to find meaning in the "sum of the customs of 

 matter" can not both be entirely right, although both may be par- 

 tially'' right. We nuist also remember that one may find serious flaws 

 in an attempt to answer the riddle of existence, even if he have no 

 answer of his own. Of Huxley's two utterances upon the ethical 

 pro])lem, the latest seems to me to present, to the inqiiirci* who 

 approaches the problem from the standpoint of modern biological sci- 

 ence, certain grave difl^culties from which the first is free. 



If, reflecting upon some partial view of our experience, we regard 

 it as a whole, forgetting that it is a })art and not the whole, the results 

 of our reflections may seem to l)e the ol)vi()Us conchision of sound 

 reasoning, when they are no ])etter than illustrations of the tiireadhare 

 fallacy of the undistributed middle. Our minds are so constituted 

 that a path which our thoughts liave once foliowc^d becomes easier 

 with each new venture, while it grows harder at the sam(> time for us 

 to consider what lies outside the borders of this path. No rational 

 being, whose mind is such as we find ours to be. can treat a i)art as a 

 complete and independent subject for reflection without danger of 

 forgetting that it is not the whole but only a part. 



"When the ancient sage looked the world, and especially human 

 life, in the face," says Huxley, "he found it as hard as we do to bring 

 the course of evolution into harmony with even the elementary 

 requirements of the ethical ideal of the just and the good." 



Can we seek for meaning in any natural world except the one we 

 know, and are not the things we know our own knowledge ? May 

 not the ancient sage, in his ert'orts to contemplate as a spectator an 

 experience which would not be at all if it were not his experience, 

 have forgotten that it is onh^ through his own e3'es that he can 

 look the world in the face^ If 1 am to find any ethical lesson in 

 nature, must I not ask w hether the universe of which 1 am a part 

 teaches me any moral lesson? Can I, with meaning in ni}^ words, ask 

 whether it would teach a moral lesson to an unconcerned spectator? 



"Brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well seem 

 to stand condemned," says Huxley. "The conscience of man revolted 

 against the moral indifference of nature, and the microcosmic atom 

 should have found the macrocosm guilty. But few have ventured to 

 record that verdict." Is not failure to record a verdict according to 

 the evidence to be regarded as doubt whether all the pertinent evi- 

 dence has been presented? May not the reservation of its verdict by 

 the microcosm be the expression of an unformulated conviction that 



