THE ISSUES OF LIFE 291 



indifference, — a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and 

 not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance ; 

 with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion ■' 

 (1905, p. 43). " Beauty and hideousness, love and cru- 

 elty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble 

 partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of 

 the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful 

 power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things to- 

 gether meaninglessly to a common doom " (1905, p. 41). 



Now there is a via media between these two extreme 

 views, and it is the path of accuracy. On the one hand, 

 we must not pick and choose our facts, selecting those which 

 suit our thesis and ignoring the discordant. On the other 

 hand, we must not be gratuitously anthropomorphic, project- 

 ing upon Nature concepts drawn from human society which 

 very imperfectly fit. We must also guard against allowing 

 human sentiments, as to supposed cruelty and the like, to 

 lead us astray in domains where they are irrelevant. We 

 must be restrained and critical in the degree to which we 

 read ethical content into animal behaviour, — especially when 

 it is of the instinctive type. 



§ 2. The Twofold Business of Life. 



As we contemplate the drama of life among plants and 

 animals, both as we can see it around us with our eyes, 

 and as we can see it with the help of telephotic apparatus 

 (such as the microscope and the pal^eontological museum!), 

 we discern one perennial problem and endeavour, namely to 

 adjust relations between the active, self-assertive, insistent, 

 insurgent organism and the environment. The inorganic 

 environment is callous, irresponsive, heavy-handed, yet re- 

 markably amenable to life's purposes; the organic environ- 



