Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/337

Rh of his Romanes address at Oxford has been hailed by skeptics as to the theory of evolution as a complete surrender of its claims in the higher fields of ethics and sociology. Using the nursery tale of Jack and the Beanstalk as illustration, Prof. Huxley assumes with the Hindu and Buddhist sages that the cosmic process is one of recurring cyclical changes—of alternating development and disintegration—in which no real and definite progress is discernible. And what is true in the field of physics, he says, "is true of living things in general. . . . The process of life presents the same appearance of cyclical evolution." Moreover, "where the cosmopoietic energy works through sentient beings, there arises, among its other manifestations, that which we call pain and suffering. This baleful product of evolution increases in quantity and intensity, with advancing grades of animal organization, until it attains its highest level in man. Further, the consummation is not reached in man, the mere animal; nor in man the wholly or half savage, but only in man the member of an organized polity; and it is a necessary consequence of his attempt to live in this way—that is, under those conditions which are essential to the full development of his noblest powers." Ergo, he tacitly and avowedly assumes, no moral tendency or purpose or effect are predicable of the cosmic energy; on the contrary, "the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." The relation of man to Nature is one of insoluble dualism and eternal antagonism. His only hope of individual salvation and social amelioration is to struggle continually against her cosmic tendencies, enduring an ever-increasing consciousness of the stress and pain involved of necessity in the age-long struggle. As a teacher in the field of ethics, she can only show him "how not to do it."

Without attempting an elaborate argument in reply to Prof. Huxley's positions, which have already run the gantlet of much favorable and adverse criticism, I may perhaps be permitted to make them the text of a brief exposition of what I conceive to be the true and logical bearing of evolutionary thought upon the great problem of man's relation to the universe, and of his moral nature to those physical and biological conditions under which he has come into existence, and upon normal relations to which his well-being admittedly depends.

Let me ask, at the outset, by what authority as an evolutionist does Prof. Huxley revert to the old theological conception which places Nature and man in radical antithesis? Is not the human mind, including its loftiest ethical determinations, as much the product of evolution, a part of universal Nature, as the brute forces which control the struggle for existence in the lower planes