THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 23 



view of human development should paralyse morality by 

 encouraging the notion that we are only helpless cogwheels 

 in a vast machine. Whatever may be the real explanation 

 of man's liberty to choose and act, face to face with the 

 inexorable sequence of the universe, it is certain that men 

 live under the same law as that which governs all other 

 organised beings upon this globe, the law of struggle for 

 existence. A recognition of metaphysical fatalism does not 

 destroy this law, or relieve us from the necessity of acting by 

 strife and struggle in the effort to retain our hold on being 

 and to advance toward higher stages. Determinism, as com- 

 monly now held, accepts the theory of man's control within 

 certain limits over his own character. We have come to 

 doubt the power of the will to effect a sudden change from 

 vice to virtue or the contrary ; we regard the doctrine of 

 repentance and grace in articulo mortis as a hindrance rather 

 than an incentive to right conduct ; we hold that the indi- 

 vidual can only direct, cultivate, and repress tendencies in 

 himself and others. This, however, implies the power of 

 resolution to form good habits and the determination to 

 enforce them by a continued exercise of volition. A man 

 wills to minimise his tendencies toward vice by encouraging 

 his opposite tendencies toward virtue, quite as much as the 

 man wills who is supposed to change his vicious nature in 

 one moment. The difference is that the process implied by 

 self-culture and formation of habits is a lengthy one, and that 

 the seductive prospect of living in sin with the hope of dying 

 in grace is removed. Thus Science, far more stringently 

 than Christianity, cries to the sinner, ' Be not deceived : God 

 is not mocked ; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 

 reap.' Nevertheless it is clear that determinism, unless it 

 renounces ethics altogether, occupies an illogical position ; 

 for it has not overcome the old antinomy of free-will and 

 necessity. It has not explained the possibility of willing to 

 will, apart from the phenomenon of willing as a mode of 

 consciousness. But acquiescence in the illogical forms part 

 of the duty of rational beings, who have become conscious of 

 their limitations, who understand the inevitable conditions of 



