24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 



intellectual progress. We must not expect Science suddenly 

 to explain the categorical imperative. Nor must we expect 

 that it will make the existence of sin, pain, disease, want, the 

 inequalities of life in all its phases, the waste that goes on 

 everywhere in Nature, at once intelligible. Only I cannot see 

 how the cosmic enthusiasm fails more conspicuously than 

 Hebrew or than Christian theology face to face with these 

 problems. I cannot see how the conception of universal 

 order, wherein human beings play their inevitable parts, is 

 more destructive to volition than the conception of an all- 

 creative, all-controlling, all-foreseeing deity. I cannot see 

 that Science has rendered men indifferent to the sufferings 

 of their fellows, or that it has enfeebled their courage, their 

 sense of duty, and their energy in action. I cannot see that 

 they are less sensitive to human hardship than the orthodox 

 of Dante's stamp, who serenely acquiesced in the exclusion of 

 unbaptized souls from happiness for ever. Meanwhile the 

 soundness of the scientific method gives us some right to 

 hope that illumination may eventually be thrown by it upon 

 even the obscurest puzzles of experience. Through it, for 

 the first time, we seem to have obtained some rational 

 control over circumstance. Instead of excluding hope, this 

 new gospel enables us to live daily and hourly in what Blake 

 called ' eternity's sunrise,' the dawn of ever-broadening light 

 and ever-soaring expectation. 



Men are always in too great a hurry. More than eighteen 

 centuries have elapsed since the apostles awaited the im- 

 mediate coming of their Lord. He has not yet come in the 

 way they hoped for ; and those eighteen centuries now form 

 by far the most important, the best-filled, period of history. 

 During them we have learned gradually to disbelieve in a 

 speedy dissolution of the world ; and lately we have been 

 brought to face the probability that men will last for many 

 millions of years upon this planet. With that thought in 

 our minds, let us look back upon man's past existence. How 

 dim are human memory and records with respect to anything 

 which happened four thousand years ago ! With what con- 

 tinually accelerated impetus has consciousness been growing 



