II 



EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 75 



the will to its behests. It is this which commands 

 all men to love one another, to return good for evil, to 

 regard one another as fellow-citizens of one great 

 state. Indeed, seeing that the progress towards 

 perfection of a civilized state, or polity, depends 

 on the obedience of its members to these com- 

 mands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure 

 reason the ' political ' nature. Unfortunately, 

 the sense of the adjective has undergone so much 

 modification, that the application of it to that 

 which commands the sacrifice of self to the 

 common good would now sound almost grotesque.^^ 



But what part is played by the theory of evolu- 

 tion in this view of ethics ? So far as I can 

 discern, the ethical system of the Stoics, which is 

 essentially intuitive, and reverences the categorical 

 imperative as strongly as that of any later 

 moralists, might have been just what it was if they 

 had held any other theory ; whether that of special 

 creation, on the one side, or that of the eternal 

 existence of the present order, on the other.^*^ To 

 the Stoic, the cosmos had no importance for the 

 conscience, except in so far as he chose to think 

 it a pedagogue to virtue. The pertinacious opti- 

 mism of our philosophers hid from them the actual 

 state of the case. It prevented them from seeing 

 that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the 

 headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. 

 The logic of facts was nec'essaiy to convince them 



