EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 27 



means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the 

 cosmos to man. If this world is full of pain and sorrow ; if grief 

 and evil fall, like the rain, upon both the just and the unjust ; it 

 is because, like the rain, they are links in the endless chain of 

 natural causation by which past, present, and future are indissol- 

 ubly connected ; and there is no more injustice in the one case 

 than in the other. Every sentient being is reaping as it has 

 sown ; if not in this life, then in one or other of the infinite series 

 of antecedent existences of which it is the latest term. The present 

 distribution of good and evil is, therefore, the algebraical sum of 

 accumulated positive and negative deserts ; or rather, it depends 

 on the floating balance of the account. For it was not thought 

 necessary that a complete settlement should ever take place. Ar- 

 rears might stand over as a sort of " hanging gale " ; a period of 

 celestial happiness just earned might be succeeded by ages of tor- 

 ment in a hideous nether world, the balance still overdue for 

 some remote ancestral error.* 



worlds with phantoms of this, the Egyptian doctrine would seem to presuppose the Indian 

 as a more archaic belief. 



Prof. Rhys Davids has fully insisted upon the ethical importance of the transmigration 

 theory. " One of the latest speculations now being put forward among ourselves would 

 seek to explain each man's character, and even his outward condition in life, by the char- 

 acter he inherited from his ancestors, a character gradually formed during a practically end- 

 less series of past existences, modified only by the conditions into which he was born, those 

 very conditions being also, in like manner, the last result of a practically endless series of 

 past causes. Gotama's speculation might be stated in the same words. But it attempted 

 also to explain, in a way different from that which would be adopted by the exponents of 

 the modern theory, that strange problem which it is also the motive of the wonderful 

 drama of the book of Job to explain the fact that the actual distribution here of good 

 fortune, or misery, is entirely independent of the moral qualities which men call good or 

 bad. We can not wonder that a teacher, whose whole system was so essentially an ethical 

 reformation, should have felt it incumbent upon him to seek an explanation of this appar- 

 ent injustice. And all the more so, since the belief he had inherited, the theory of the 

 transmigration of souls, had provided a solution perfectly sufficient to any one who could 

 accept that belief." (Hibbert Lectures, p. 93.) I should venture to suggest the substitu- 

 tion of " largely " for " entirely " in the foregoing passage. Whether a ship makes a good 

 or a bad voyage is largely independent of the conduct of the captain, but it is as largely 

 affected by that conduct. Though powerless before a hurricane, he may weather many a 

 bad gale. 



* " The outward condition of the soul is, in each new birth, determined by its actions in 

 a previous birth ; but by each action in succession and not by the balance struck after the 

 evil has been reckoned off against the good. A good man, who has once uttered a slander, 

 may spend a hundred thousand years as a god, in consequence of his goodness, and, when 

 the power of his good actions is exhausted, may be born as a dumb man on account of his 

 transgression ; and a robber who has once done an act of mercy, may come to life in a king's 

 body as a result of his virtue, and then suffer torments for ages in hell or as a ghost without 

 a body, or be reborn many times as a slave or an outcast, in consequence of his evil life. 



"There is no escape, according to this theory, from the result of any act; though it is 

 only the consequences of its own acts that each soul has to endure. The force has been set 

 in motion by itself and can never stop ; and its effect can never be foretold. If evil, it can 



