232 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



the sine qua tion of morality, of ethics and all practical 

 philosophy. 



63. So far as the ethics of naturalism are concerned, the 



Mill and 



Huxley on proccsscs of nature, as conceived by the older utilitarian 



the cosmic '' 



process, school, Were condemned already by Mill as ethically in- 

 sufficient ; and as conceived by the modern evolutionist 

 school they have been still more drastically condemned 

 by Huxley, who says : " The practice of that which is 

 ethically best — what we call goodness or virtue — involves 

 a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to 

 that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for 

 existence. . . . The ethical progress of society depends, 

 not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running 

 away from it, but in combating it ; " ^ or, as Huxley's 

 position has been paraphrased by Sorley : " The cosmic 

 order has nothing to say to the moral order, except that, 

 somehow or other, it has given it birth ; the moral 

 order has nothing to say to the cosmic order, except that 

 it is certainly bad." " 



64. Professor Sorley has, at the end of his ' Ethics of 



Hypo- 



theticai iSaturalism,' suggested that the facts brought out by the 

 sciences of natural as well as of mental evolution, leave 

 room for, though they may not demonstrate, an idealistic 

 interpretation, seeing in the history of nature as well 

 as in that of mind the existence of a definite purpose. 

 He does not attempt a justification of such a view, but 

 merely remarks " that it enables us to avoid both the 

 fruitless efforts of the naturalists to derive an ethical 

 doctrine from the history of development, and the an- 



^ Huxley in the " Romanes Lee- ' Collected Essajs.' 

 ture" (1893), "Evolution and -Sorley, 'Recent Tendencies in 



Ethics," republished in vol. ix. of Ethics ' (p. 47). 



Idealism. 



