THE MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES. 21 



ape and the tiger." ^ That stage reached, " for thou- 

 sands and thousands of years, before the origin of the 

 oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very- 

 low type. They strove with their enemies and their 

 competitors ; they preyed upon things weaker or less 

 cunning than themselves ; they were born, multiplied 

 without stint, and died, for thousands of generations, 

 alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the 

 hyaena, whose lives were spent in the same way ; and 

 they were no more to be praised or blamed, on moral 

 grounds, than their less erect and more hairy com- 

 patriots. . . . Life was a continual free fight, and 

 beyond the limited and temporary relations of the 

 family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the 

 normal state of existence. The human species, like 

 others, plashed and floundered amid the general 

 stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as 

 it best might, and thinking neither of whence nor 

 whither." ^ 



How then does Mr. Huxley act — for it is instructive 

 to follow out the consequences of an error — in the face 

 of this tremendous problem ? He gives it up. There 

 is no solution. Nature is without excuse. After 

 framing an indictment against it in the severest lan- 

 guage at his command, he turns his back upon Nature 

 — sub-human Nature, that is — and leaves teleology to 

 settle the score as best it can. " The history of civili- 

 zation," he tells us, " is the record of the attempts of 

 the human race to escape from this position." But 

 whither does he betake himself? Is he not part of 

 Nature, and therefore a sharer in its guilt ? By no 



^ Evolution and Ethics, p. 6. 

 ^Nineteenth Century, Feb., 18S8. 



