CHAP, xiv REACTION FROM DARWINISM : HUXLEY 1 5 1 



hives of bees, and all social or gregarious creatures 

 have suspended the struggle within their own com- 

 munity. "To this extent," he admits, "the cosmic 

 process begins to be checked by a rudimentary 

 ethical process, which is, strictly speaking, part of 

 the former, just as the ' governor ' in a steam-engine 

 is part of the mechanism of the engine." 1 This 

 represents the sum total of the concessions which 

 he would make to those like Messrs. Geddes and 

 Thomson or the late Henry Drummond, who allege 

 that Nature is not wholly red in tooth and claw, but 

 that a principle of love is gradually disclosed and 

 made predominant as we ascend the evolutionary 

 scale. He grants that the wicked process of strug- 

 gle is partially, slightly, very slightly checked, and 

 checked by justice ; but, in the main, cosmical nature 

 is full of struggle, and, from our human point of 

 view, full of wickedness. 



The rest of the lecture does not add very much to 

 these essential ideas. It verifies them by tracing 

 former evolutionary thought in India and Greece. 

 Indian wisdom regarded all things as embraced in an 

 evolutionary process extending through aeon after 

 aeon, and life upon life ; but it held this process to be 

 downright bad and unhappy. Buddhism, its most 

 characteristic expression, rested on a pessimistic view 

 of the world ; such pessimism may have been one- 

 sided, but its existence proves how little a belief in 

 cosmic evolution did, in those days, to guide men as 

 to their personal conduct. The cosmic process said 

 "Live!" The enlightened one said "Extinguish 

 yourselves ! " In Greece, the ethic of the Stoics was 



1 p. 197- 



