18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 



even the death of those whose love was unspeakably precious, 

 we do not passionately demand again our darlings, or cling 

 with tremulous persistence to the promise of immortality. 

 Now, as formerly, the continuance of the individual after 

 death remains a matter for hope and faith. Science as yet 

 can neither affirm nor deny the life beyond the grave ; but it 

 teaches us that it is dangerous to appeal to personal desires 

 upon this topic, and that St. Paul's audacious challenge, ' If 

 Christ be not risen, then are we of all men most wretched,' 

 belonged to a past stage of religious development. The 

 confidence it inculcates is that nothing can come amiss to 

 those who have brought their wills and wishes into accord 

 with universal order. This will be stigmatised as optimism, 

 I am well aware. It is certainly the antithesis of that 

 puny pessimism which forms a marked sign of intellectual 

 enfeeblement in the younger schools of German thought. 

 To the pessimist we say 



' Thou art sick of self-love, Malvolio, 

 And taste with a distempered appetite.' 



It is not my present business to deal with pessimism, how- 

 ever, but to seek out how the scientific spirit is remoulding 

 religion. Religion has been always optimistic ; and whatever 

 science is, it certainly is not pessimistic. The non-religious 

 may draw conclusions from it which envenom life. Those, 

 on the contrary, who naturally incline towards religion, will 

 find in it fresh aliment for masculine contentment. They 

 recognise themselves as factors of a life which is the world, 

 to the effectuation of which they each in their degree con- 

 tribute, the scope and scheme of which, though ill understood 

 by them, requires and must obtain their co-operation. Law 

 and God the order of the whole regarded as a process of 

 unerringly unfolding energy, and that same order contem- 

 plated by human thought as in its essence mind-determined 

 have become for them so all in all, that a wish for self, 

 an egotistical aspiration, is quelled at once as infantile, 

 undisciplined, irrelevant. Their chief dread is that dread 

 expressed by Cleanthes, namely, that peradventure their 



