60 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS ii 



In the great Semitic trial of this issue, Job 

 takes refuge in silence and submission ; the Indian 

 and the Greek, less wise perhaps, attempt to re- 

 concile the irreconcilable and plead for the defend- 

 ant. To this end, the Greeks invented Theo- 

 dicies; while the Indians devised what, in its 

 ultimate form, must rather be termed a Cos- 

 modicy. For, though Buddhism recognizes gods 

 many and lords many, they are products of the 

 cosmic jDrocess ; and transitory, however long en- 

 during, manifestations of its eternal activity. In 

 the doctrine of transmigration, whatever its origin, 

 Brahminical and Buddhist speculation found, 

 ready to hand,* the 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 Hnks in the endless chain of natural 

 causation by which past, present, and future are 

 indissolubly 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 



