Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/636

618 perhaps) "compound for sins we are inclined to by damning those we have no mind to." So in the daily life of what is called peace. The stage-coach proprietor rejoiced when he had driven his rival off the road, railway directors and shareholders now do the same, so do publicans, shopkeepers, and other rivals. We are still permeated by the old notion of good and evil. But "antagonism," as I view it, not only comprehends the relation of good and evil, but, as I have said, produces both, and is as necessary to good as to evil. Without it there would be neither good nor evil. Judging of the lives of our progenitors from what we see of the present races of men of less cerebral development, we may characterize them as having been more impulsive than ourselves, and as having their joys and sorrows more quickly alternated. After the hunt for food, accompanied by privation and suffering, comes the feast to gorging. Their main evil was starvation, their good repletion. Even now the Esquimau watches a seal-hole in the bitter cold for hours and days, and his compensation is the spearing and eating the seal. The good is resultant upon and in the long run I suppose equivalent to the evil. These men look not back into the past, and forward into the future, as we do. We, by extending our thought over a wider area, are led to more continuing sacrifices, and aim at more lasting enjoyment in the result. The child suffers at school in order that his future life may be more prosperous. The man spends the best part of his life in arduous toil, physical or mental, in order that he may not want in his later years, or that his family may reap the benefit of his labor. Further-seeing men spend their whole lives on work little remunerative that succeeding generations may be benefited. The prudent man transmits health and wealth to his descendants, the improvident man poverty or gout. One main element of what we call civilization is the capability of looking further back into the past, and further forward into the future; but, though measured on a different scale, the average antagonism and approximate equivalence appear to me to be the same.

Can we suppose a state of things either in the inorganic or the organic world which, consistently with our experience or any deduction drawn from it, would be without antagonism. In the inorganic world it would be the absence of all movement, or, what practically amounts to the same thing, movement of everything in the same direction, and the same relative velocity; for, as movement is only known to us by relation, movement where nothing is stationary or moving in a different direction, or with a different velocity, would be unrecognizable. So in the organic but nonsentient world, if there were no struggle, no absorption of food, no growth, nothing to overcome, there would be nothing to call life. If, again, in the sentient world there were no appetites, no hopes