Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/119

No. 1.] tendencies and the essential principles which alone are really able to provide a criterion of the degree of evolution in its relation to morality. The first requisite is to raise oneself above evolution itself in order to attain a new point of view. Some biologists, because of their remarkable progress in a special field of human knowledge, seem to hold that they have already reached this point of view; having won their reputation in a special field of research, they invest their childish notions of religion, ethics, and philosophy with the sanctity borrowed from this reputation; but does an extended knowledge of the facts of biology necessarily justify dogmatic utterances on philosophical questions? The one way to connect and relate the results of the special scientists in a logical and sensible whole, in which their real meaning becomes apparent, is to abandon the conception that philosophy is a domain of repose, abstracted from life, and to encourage the special scientist himself to become a philosopher. For example, if Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and 'survival of the fittest' is taken as a philosophical truth, expressing the ultimate nature of the world, it is easily translated by a military bureaucracy, such as exists in Germany, into a justification of war as fulfilling the real purpose of nature. But Darwin was always a scientist, never a philosopher; and, as Huxley has pointed out, his formulæ do not take account of the ability of animals to communicate with each other, their capacity for coöperation, and their faculty of transmitting without interruption ideas from one generation to the next. Further, the principle of the 'survival of the fittest' reduces in the last analysis to a mere tautology, because under any given set of conditions the fittest are those who are able to survive. Herbert Spencer's formula, although it is more comprehensive, is no less inadequate. Simplicity and complexity cannot be taken as terms in the estimation of progress, and thus Spencer leaves us without a criterion of evolution. Whether the physical constitution of man is more complex than that of the animals is an indifferent question. Man is an animal who uses tools, who thinks. These faculties, not possessed by animals, give man the power of controlling the forces of nature, and this is the true criterion of evolution. Systems of controlling and coordinating activity may be developed in many ways, and offer many standards, but if they are evaluated from the point of view of the control of nature, a simple principle of evaluation is supplied. The efficacy of this control may be measured in terms of man's ability to look forward and backward. It reveals science as one of the highest accomplishments of man. But man's intellectual development is always conditioned by his moral development, which forms the basis of society, the main determinant of scientific progress, in which the "Tripod of Ethics,—Truth, Energy, and Sympathy,"—appears as the true principle of the worth of human life.

To be happy, the individual must investigate his own personal character and determine his limitations. Happiness is purely an individual affiairaffair [sic]; it