1 88 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 



diet in favour of violence and against social justice." The 

 laws of biology furnish them with a scientific foundation 

 for believing that might is right ; that progress comes 

 through conflict in which the fittest survives ; that it must 

 be unwise in the long run to interfere with the struggle ; 

 that we must not sympathise with the beaten and the weak. 

 The idea of evolution has yielded to them a fatalistic creed, 

 and taught them to conceive "a vast world-process in 

 which human will and intelligence play a subordinate, and, 

 in a sense, blind and unconscious part." Nay, humanity 

 itself ' ' is taken as a product of forces similar in character 

 to those which made the ape. It does not shape its own 

 fate. The future of society is not in the hands of states- 

 men or thinkers, but is determined by the play of forces 

 which are beyond human control." Destiny is responsible 

 for our acts. Destiny furnishes an excuse for ethically 

 reprehensible modes of behaviour. Destiny has ' ' para- 

 lysed the check on the moral consciousness." 



And philosophy, "the most popular philosophy of our 

 time," the Idealism to which ' ' it would be natural to look 

 for a counterpoise to these crude doctrines of physical 

 force" what of Idealism? It has had "a more subtly 

 retrograde influence than any of the scientific creeds which 

 it condemns." "Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say 

 that the effect of Idealism on the world in general has been 

 mainly to sap intellectual and moral sincerity, to excuse 

 men in their consciences for professing beliefs which in the 

 meaning ordinarily attached to them they do not hold, to 

 soften the edges of all hard contrasts between right and 

 wrong, truth and falsity, to throw a gloss over stupidity, 

 and prejudice, and caste, and tradition, to weaken the bases 

 of reason, and disincline men to the searching analysis of 



