n EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 59 



this subject. The book of Job is at one with the 

 " Works and Days " and the Buddhist Sutras; 

 the Psalmist and the Preacher of Israel, with the 

 Tragic Poets of Greece. What is a more common 

 motive of the ancient tragedy in fact, than the 

 unfathomable injustice of the nature of things; 

 what is more deeply felt to be true than its pre- 

 sentation of the destruction of the blameless by 

 the work of his own hands, or by the fatal oper- 

 ation of the sins of others? Surely (Edipus was 

 pure of heart; it was the natural sequence of 

 events — the cosmic process — which drove him, in 

 all innocence, to slay his father and become the 

 husband of his mother, to the desolation of his 

 people and his own headlong ruin. Or to step, for 

 a moment, beyond the chronological limits I have 

 set myself, what constitutes the sempiternal at- 

 traction of Hamlet but the appeal to deepest ex- 

 perience of that history of a no less blameless 

 dreamer, dragged, in spite of himself, into a world 

 out of joint; involved in a tangle of crime and 

 misery, created by one of the prime agents of the 

 cosmic process as it works in and through man? 



Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, 

 the cosmos might well seem to stand condemned. 

 The conscience of man revolted against the moral 

 indifference of nature, and the microcosmic atom 

 should* have found the illimitable macrocosm 

 guilty. But few, or none, ventured to record that 

 verdict. 



