278 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



that this organic progress, like the earlier organic 

 differentiation, is an inevitable consequence of the 

 struggle for existence. Thousands of beautiful and 

 remarkable species of animals and plants have 

 perished during those 48,000,000 years, to give place 

 to stronger competitors, and the victors in this 

 struggle for life were not always the noblest or most 

 perfect forms in a moral sense. 



It has been just the same with the history of 

 humanity. The splendid civilisation of classical 

 antiquity perished because Christianity, with its faith 

 in a loving God and its hope of a better life beyond 

 the grave, gave a fresh, strong impetus to the soaring 

 human mind. The Papal Church quickly degenerated 

 into a pitiful caricature of real Christianity, and ruth- 

 lessly scattered the treasures of knowledge which the 

 Hellenic philosophy had gathered ; it gained the 

 dominion of the world through the ignorance of the 

 credulous masses. In time the Reformation broke 

 the chains of this mental slavery, and assisted reason 

 to secure its right once more. But in the new, as in 

 the older, period the great struggle for existence went 

 on in its eternal fluctuation, with no trace of a moral 

 order. 



And it is just as impossible for the impartial and 

 critical observer to detect a " wise providence " in the 

 fate of individual human beings as a moral order in 

 the history of peoples. Both are determined with 

 iron necessity by a mechanical causality which 

 connects every single phenomenon with one or more 

 antecedent causes. Even the ancient Greeks recog- 

 nised ananke, the blind heimarmcne, the fate " that 

 rules gods and men," as the supreme principle of the 

 universe. Christianity replaced it by a conscious 



