Darwin's attitude towards ultimate questions 463 
great exertion of the body or mind, in the pleasure of our daily 
meals, and especially in the pleasure derived from sociability, and 
from loving our families.” But there was to him so much suffering 
in the world that it was a strong argument against the existence of 
an intelligent First Cause. 
It seems to me that Darwin was not so clear on another question, 
that of the relation between improvement and adaptation. He wrote 
to Lyell: “When you contrast natural selection and ‘improvement,’ 
you seem always to overlook...that every step in the natural selection 
of each species implies improvement in that species in relation to its 
condition of life....Improvement implies, I suppose, each form 
obtaining many parts or organs, all excellently adapted for their 
functions.” “All this,” he adds, “seems to me quite compatible with 
certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or 
being degraded2” But the great question is, if the conditions of 
life will in the long run favour “improvement” in the sense of 
differentiation (or harmony of differentiation and integration). Many 
beings are best adapted to their conditions of life if they have few 
organs and few necessities. Pessimism would not only be the conse- 
quence, if suffering outweighed happiness, but also if the most 
elementary forms of happiness were predominant, or if there were 
a tendency to reduce the standard of life to the simplest possible, the 
contentment of inertia or stable equilibrium. There are animals 
which are very highly differentiated and active in their young state, 
but later lose their complex organisation and concentrate them- 
selves on the one function of nutrition. In the human world analogies 
to this sort of adaptation are not wanting. Young “idealists” very 
often end as old “ Philistines.’ Adaptation and progress are not the 
same. 
Another question of great importance in respect to human evolu- 
tion is, whether there will be always a possibility for the existence 
of an impulse to progress, an impulse to make great claims on life, to 
be active and to alter the conditions of life instead of adapting to 
them in a passive manner. Many people do not develop because 
they have too few necessities, and because they have no power to 
imagine other conditions of life than those under which they live. In 
his remarks on “the pleasure from exertion” Darwin has a point of 
contact with the practical idealism of former times—with the ideas of 
Lessing and Goethe, of Condorcet and Fichte. The continual striving 
which was the condition of salvation to Faust’s soul, is also the con- 
dition of salvation to mankind. There is a holy fire which we ought 
to keep burning, if adaptation is really to be improvement. If, as 
I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Religion, the innermost 
1 Life and Letters, Vol. 1. p. 310. 2 Ibid, Vol. 1. p. 177. 
