MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES 33 



be read from the end and not from the beginning. 

 And if even a rudiment of a moral order be found 

 in the beginnings of this process it relates itself and 

 that process to a final end and a final unity. 



Philosophy reads end into the earlier process by 

 a necessity of reason. But how much stronger 

 its position if it could add to that a basis in the 

 facts of Nature ? "I ask the evolutionist," per- 

 tinently inquires Mr. Huxley's critic, " who has 

 no other basis than the Struggle for existence, how 

 he accounts for the intrusion of these moral ideas 

 and standards which presume to interfere with the 

 cosmic process and sit in judgment upon its re- 

 sults."^ May we ask the philosopher how he accounts 

 for them ? As little can he account for them as 

 he who has " no other basis than the Struggle for 

 existence." Truly, the writer continues, the ques- 

 tion " cannot be answered so long as we regard 

 morality merely as an incidental result, a by- 

 product, as it were, of the cosmical system." But 

 what if morality be the main product of the 

 cosmical system — of even the cosmical system ? 

 What if it can be shown that it is the essential 

 and not the incidental result of it, and that so far 

 from being a by-product, it is ^wmorality that is 

 the by-product? 



^Prof. Seth, Blackwood^ s Magazine^ Dec, 1893, 

 c 



