Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/620

602 but we did need a Darwin to show us that, out of all the evil which we see, at least so much of good as we have known has come; that if this is a world of pain and sorrow, hunger, strife, and death, at least the suffering has not been altogether profitless; that whatever may be "the far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves," the whole creation, in all its pain and in all its travail, is certainly moving, and this in a direction which makes, if not for "righteousness," at all events for improvement. No doubt the origin of evil has proved a more difficult problem to solve than the origin of species; but, thus viewed, I think that the Darwinian doctrine deserves to be regarded as in some measure a mitigation of the difficulty—certainly in no case an aggravation of it. I do not deny that an immense residuum of difficulty remains, seeing that, so far as we can judge, the means employed certainly do not appear to be justified by the ends attained. But even here we ought not to lose sight of the possibility that, if we could see deeper into the mystery of things, we might find some further justification of the evil, as unsuspected as was that which, as it seems to me, Darwin has brought to light. It is not in itself impossible—perhaps it is not even improbable—that the higher instincts of man may be pointing with as true an aim as those lower instincts of the brutes which we have been contemplating. And, even if the theory of evolution were ever to succeed in furnishing as satisfactory an explanation of the natural development of the former as it has of the natural development of the latter, I think that the truest exponent of the meaning—as distinguished from the causation—of these higher instincts would still be, not the man of science, but the poet. Here, therefore, it seems to me, that men of science ought to leave the question of pain in Nature to be answered, so far as it can be answered, by the general voice of that humanity which we all share, and which is able to acknowledge that at least its own allotment of suffering is not an unmitigated evil.

 For clouds of sorrow deepness lend, To change joy's early rays, And manhood's eyes alone can send A grief-ennobled gaze;

While to that gaze alone expand Those skies of fullest thought, Beneath whose starlit vaults we stand, Lone, wondering, and untaught."

We look before and after, And pine for what is not. Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught."

Yet still—