464: Evolution and Modern Philosophy 



core of all religion is faith in the persistence of value in the world, 

 and if the highest values express themselves in the cry "Excelsior ! " 

 then the capital point is, that this cry should always be;heard and 

 folloAved. We have here a corollary of the theory of evolution in 

 its application to human life. 



Darwin declared himself an agnostic, not only because he could 

 not harmonise the large amount of suffering in the world with the 

 idea of a God as its first cause, but also because he " was aware that 

 if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it 

 came and how it arose \" He saw, as Kant had seen before him and 

 expressed in his Kritik der Urtheilskraft, that we cannot accept 

 either of the only two possibilities which we are able to conceive : 

 chance (or brute force) and design. Neither mechanism nor teleology 

 can give an absolute ansAver to ultimate questions. The universe, 

 and especially the organic life in it, can neither be explained aa a 

 mere combination of absolute elements nor as the effect of a con- 

 structing thought. Darwin concluded, as Kant, and before liim 

 Spinoza, that the oppositions and distinctions which our experience 

 presents, cannot safely be regarded as valid for existence in itself. 

 And, with Kant and Fichte, he found his stronghold in the conviction 

 that man has something to do, even if he cannot solve all enigmas. 

 " The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond 

 the scope of man's intellect ; but man can do his duty^." 



Is this the last word of human thought ? Does not the possibility, 

 that man can do his duty, suppose that the conditions of life allow of 

 continuous ethical striving, so that there is a certain harmony 

 between cosmic order and human ideals ? Darwin himself has shown 

 how the consciousness of duty can arise as a natural result of evolu- 

 tion. Moreover there are lines of evolution which have their end in 

 ethical idealism, in a kingdom of values, which must struggle for 

 life as all things in the world must do, but a kingdom which has its 

 firm foundation in reality. 



1 Life and Letters, Vol. i. p. 30o. 2 mj^^ p. 307, 



