Man Part of the Cosmos 273 



development of man, and these are equally necessary 

 for and equally susceptible to increased pleasure and 

 increased happiness. It is not necessary to regard the 

 cosmic process as evil. Even when man, in various 

 ages, had elaborated the conception of abstract good- 

 ness, and had endeavoured to make his justice a doling 

 out of reward and punishment according to merit, it 

 was not inevitable to bring in a verdict of guilty against 

 the Cosmos. It is quite true that, in all the ages, man 

 has seen the sun shine on the unjust as on the just. 

 But it is an easy reflection that the world could not 

 turn round on individual merit, and if few are so guilty 

 as to deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, 

 still fewer deserve some of the simpler and more com- 

 mon joys of life. The conception that w^as implicit in 

 tlie disciplines of the older philosophies is still open to 

 the philosophy of evolution. Behind it, as behind the 

 " self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma," 

 the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the apathcia of the 

 Stoics, there may lie a recognition of the worthless- 

 ness of the individual : an equable acceptation of one's 

 self as part of a process : a triumph of intelligence over 

 selfishness. Finally, behind the sharp division made 

 between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of 

 the oldest and most enduring fallacies of the world, 

 a fallacy that Huxley hiuLself spent a great part of 

 his intellectual life in discovering and routing. The 

 fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something 

 separate and apart from man, as something through 

 which he, however briefly, passes. Thus Omar sang : 



" Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent 

 Doctor and saint, and heard great argument 

 About it and about : but evermore 



Came out by the same door where in I went. 



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