Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/627

Rh said, "War is the father and king of all things." Hobbes said war is the natural state of man, but his expressions have about them some little ambiguity. In Chapter I of the "De Corpore Politico," he says, "Irresistible might in a state of Nature is right," and "The estate of man in this natural liberty is war." Subsequently he says, "A man gives up his natural right, for when divers men having right not only to all things else, but to one another's persons, if they use the same there ariseth thereby invasion on the one part and resistance on the other, which is war, and therefore contrary to the law of Nature, the sum whereof consisteth in making peace." I can only explain this apparent inconsistency by supposing he meant "law of Nature" to be something different from "the natural estate of man," and that the making peace was the first effort at contract, or the beginning of law; but then why call it the "law of Nature," where he says might is right? There is, however, some obscurity in the passage. The Persian divinities, Ormuzd and Ahriman, were the supposed rulers or representatives of good and evil, always at war, and causing the continuous struggle between human beings animated respectively by these two principles. Undoubtedly good and evil are antagonistic, but antagonism, as I view it, is as necessary to good as to evil, as necessary to Ormuzd as to Ahriman. Zoroaster's religion of a divine being, one and indivisible, but with two sides, is, to my mind, a more philosophical conception. The views of Lamarck on the modification of organic beings by effort, and the establishment of the doctrine of Darwin as to the effects produced by the struggle for existence and domination, come much nearer to my subject. Darwin has shown how these struggles have modified the forms and habits of organized beings, and tended to increased differentiation, and Prof. Huxley and Herbert Spencer have powerfully promoted and expanded these doctrines. To the latter we owe the happy phrase, "survival of the fittest"; and Prof. Huxley has recently, in a paper in the "Nineteenth Century," anticipated some points I should have adverted to as to the social struggles for existence. To be anticipated, and by a very short period, is always trying, but it is more trying when what you intended to say has been said by your predecessor in more terse and appropriate language than you have at your command.

I propose to deal with "antagonism" inductively—i. e., with facts derived from observation alone—and not to meddle with spiritual matters or with consequences. Let us begin with what we know of the visible universe, viz., suns, planets, comets, meteorites, and their effects. These are all pulling at each other, and resisting that pull by the action of other forces. Any change in this pulling force produces a change, or, as it is called, perturbation, in the motion of the body pulled. The planet Neptune, as