336 Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 



on the work of Evolution to yet grander heights of beauty, 

 use, and joy, its intellectual magnificence is the merest 

 mockery of its moral imbecility. The development of free 

 personality in human life has been so far the crowning work 

 of Evolution, the crowning work of God this side of death, 

 and I take it he did not blunder into it, that the creative 

 purpose set this way before the singing of the morning 

 stars. We have here, I know, the survival of a species, 

 not the survival of the individual after apparent death. 

 And if we could be allowed the vision which we once en- 

 joyed, of Humanity upon the earth advancing endlessly to 

 an ever-greatening, never absolute perfection, we might be 

 tempted to be satisfied with this. But when science comes, 

 as Mr. Serviss came in this course of lectures a few weeks 

 ago, to tell us that the climax of Evolution will be the de- 

 struction of the earth and of the solar system, and finally 

 the resolution of all the starry heavens into " a gray, wide, 

 lampless, dim, unpeopled world," she comes bringing a fresh 

 argument for an immortal life. Only so can we have any 

 true survival of the fittest. I cannot believe that all this 

 travail of the ages will only bring to birth another nebulous 

 cloud, another formless universe. I must believe that it 

 has brought to birth a universe of souls, whose continuous 

 and exalted life will justify the long gestation of the world, 

 and justify the blotting out of every star that shines in the 

 high vault of heaven. I cannot see why we should stultify 

 ourselves that we may justify the ways of God. White may 

 be black, sweet may be sour, right may be wrong to other fac- 

 ulties than ours. It is only by our own that we can judge, 

 and judging by our own, "Without Spirit-immortality," 

 as Le Conte has said, " the cosmos has no meaning. * # 

 Without Spirit-immortality this beautiful cosmos, which 

 has been developing into increasing beauty for so many 

 millions of years, when its evolution has run its course and 

 is over, would be precisely as if it had never been — an idle 

 dream, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing." 



From treating the ethical aspect of my subject, which is 

 not the least important, I am discharged by Dr. Janes's 

 clear and impressive presentation of this aspect a few weeks 

 since. I will only say that there are those who claim for 

 ethics a religious source and aim and imagine that in doing 

 this they are antagonizing the philosophy of Evolution. 

 But never has a system of ethics been conceived that is 



