42 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



sciousness or shaped in a mind in the remotest degree 

 like ours. The universe is not without an end and a 

 purpose ; far otherwise ; but the misfortune was that the 

 Unconscious, to reach its final aim, found it necessary 

 to pass through consciousness on the road a fatal and 

 all but irretrievable blunder, for which ail conscious 

 beings, and we men in particular who suffer most in 

 consciousness, are now paying the smart. 



The point to which we wish to direct attention is 

 that in the system of Hartmann there is will and purpose 

 and skill manifested in the universe and its course of 

 evolution. Not so in Darwinism, or apparently in the 

 Philosophy of Evolution of Herbert Spencer, which 

 contains the most systematic presentation of Darwin's 

 doctrines. Here Natural Selection, or the " survival of 

 the fittest," is offered to us as the sole shaping agency. 

 This it was that, after endless ages, gave us law and 

 beauty and adaptations in organic life. But natural 

 selection irresistibly raises before our minds the agency 

 of Chance, the opposite of purpose : and in natural selec- 

 tion, which takes ages to accomplish its chance results 

 the conception of a single continuing and controlling 

 Will is necessarily set aside, since such, if it existed and 

 could only manifest itself through natural selection, would 

 necessarily show itself as broken, disconnected, and con- 

 tradictory. And on this point it is that the system of 

 Hartmann seems to me to contain a deeper thought, a 

 more fundamental truth. 



The existence of purpose in the universe, Science 

 must herself admit, a purpose manifested in the fixed 

 and rigid laws in the physical world, as well as in the 

 uniform laws that govern vital processes, and the re- 

 lations of parts to each other in all organisms, nay, even 

 in the actions of men in societies, which are now found 



