6 EVOLUTION AND MAN S PLACE IN NATURE 



many or most of the ways at variance with 

 welfare. l 



The general history of the evolution of life on the 

 earth presents these two marked phases. First, Life 

 finds in environment provision for its continuance and 

 growth. Life thus shows dependence on an inferior 

 order of existence. Second, Life, in unfolding, 

 adapts itself to environment, thereby illustrating its 

 superiority. Life is the key to progress; conflict is 

 an inevitable condition of life, and out of this conflict 

 comes general advance. However attractive the 

 result, there is something startling in the fact that 

 sacrifice of life belongs to the conditions of progress. 

 Whatever the moral difficulty here, and it is par 

 ticularly great as illustrated in the bitter experience 

 of men encountering the evils of over-competition, 

 there can be no doubt that a law of sacrifice is in 

 cluded among the conditions of progress. Within 

 the history of the world s advance, there lies con 

 tinually a history of enfeeblement and death. Evil 

 attends on the good. However great the gain in the 

 world s history, suffering and sacrifice still continue. 

 Biology is fruitful of ethical perplexities. Yet, through 

 all this mixture of good and evil, there is provision 

 for general advance, in the persistence of life. The 

 inherent tendency to progress, belonging to life in 

 every form, is the mainstay for thought in seeking 

 interpretation of Nature. The conditions of the 

 material world, of organic life, and of moral life 

 combined, provide for the history of an orderly 

 universe, the growing understanding of which brings 



1 Letter to Dr. Martineau, in Appendix to his Types of Ethical 

 Theory, 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 570. 



