22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEVOLUTION 



sympathy with beasts and insects, birds of the air and fishes 

 of the sea, trees and flowers, and everything that shares the 

 life divine which throbs in us. Next to love comes humility ; 

 and I need hardly point out how Science edifies that virtue. 

 It teaches us that lower forms of ^ life, such, for instance, as 

 parasites which prey upon our bodies in disease, have their 

 place in the scheme, the same raison d'etre, while still 

 uncombated, as man. 



We need not be afraid lest the religious spirit I have 

 been attempting to describe should induce a mere habit of 

 indolent resignation to things as they at present are. On 

 the contrary, the very essence of Science in general and of 

 Evolution in particular, is to stimulate energy, combative, 

 aggressive, struggling after higher stages. It knows nothing 

 of the brutish crass indifference and ignorance of the monastic 

 mind, awaiting beatification. It makes us certain that effort is 

 the indispensable condition of advancement. If we recognise 

 the divine life in parasites, we do not mean to acquiesce in 

 their domination. They have ceased to be regarded as a 

 divine scourge for our sins ; they have become a divine means 

 for urging us to efforts after their elimination. The soul 

 possessed of Evolutionary religion, penetrated with the gospel 

 of our century, runs no peril of lapsing into the hebetude 

 of decadent Buddhism, or of exclaiming with folded hands, 

 'Whatever is, is well.' That formula will have to be ex- 

 changed for, * Whatever is, is well ; but nothing really is 

 which is not in progressive and militant movement.' 



This exposition might be carried further. It might be 

 shown how all the elements of morality are not displaced, but 

 remoulded by the scientific spirit ; how the mysteries of sin, 

 pain, disease, for instance, are quite as well accounted for by 

 formulas of evolutionary strife and imperfect development as 

 by the old hypothesis of a devil ; how duty and volition can 

 assume their places in a scheme of advance by selection and 

 modification whereof the individual is conscious, quite as well 

 as in any orthodox system which steers between the Scylla of 

 creative Deity and the Charybdis of man's liberty to act. 

 People are afraid lest a strictly scientific or deterministic 



