ETHICS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 225 



antecedent rights which another man may respect or neglect. 

 But this has no meaning as between the abstraction " Nature " 

 and the concrete facts which are themselves Nature. It is unjust 

 to treat equal claims differently. But it is not " unjust " in any 

 intelligible sense that one being should be a monkey and another 

 a man, any more than that one part of me should be a hand and 

 another a head. The question would only arise if we supposed that 

 the man and the monkey had existed before they were created, 

 and had then possessed claims to equal treatment. The most logi- 

 cal theologians indeed admit that as between creature and creator 

 there can be properly no question of justice. The pot and the 

 potter can not complain of each other. If the writer of Job had 

 been able to show that the virtuous were rewarded and the vicious 

 punished, he would only have transferred the problem to another 

 issue. The judge might be justified but the creator would be 

 condemned. How can it be just to place a being where he is cer- 

 tain to sin and then to damn him for sinning ? That is the prob- 

 lem to which no answer can be given ; and which already implies 

 a confusion of ideas. We apply the conception of justice in a 

 sphere where it is not applicable, and naturally fail to get any 

 intelligible answer. 



The question therefore resolves itself into a different one. 

 We can neither explain nor justify the existence of pain; but of 

 course we can ask whether, as a matter of fact, pain predominates 

 over pleasure, and we can ask whether, as a matter of fact, the 

 " cosmic processes " tend to promote or discourage virtuous con- 

 duct. Does the theory of the " struggle for existence " throw any 

 new light upon the general problem ? I am quite unable to see, 

 for my own part, that it really makes any difference : evil exists ; 

 and the question whether evil predominates over good can only, 

 I should say, be decided by an appeal to experience. One source 

 of evil is the conflict of interests. Every beast preys upon others, 

 and man, according to the old saying, is a wolf to man. All that 

 the Darwinian theory can do is to enable us to trace the conse- 

 quences of this fact in certain directions, but it neither reveals 

 the fact nor makes it more or less an essential part of the process. 

 It " explains " certain phenomena, in the sense of showing their 

 connection with previous phenomena, but does riot show why the 

 phenomena should present themselves at all. If we indulge our 

 minds in purely fanciful constructions, we may regard the actual 

 system as good or bad, just as we choose to imagine for its alter- 

 native a better or a worse system. If everybody had been put 

 into a world where there was no pain, or where each man could 

 get all he wanted without interfering with his neighbors, we may 

 fancy that things would have been pleasanter. If the struggle, 

 which we all know to exist, had no effect in promoting the " sur- 



